Читать книгу Billionaires: The Daredevil: Claimed for Makarov's Baby / Defying the Billionaire's Command / Redeeming the Billionaire SEAL - Lauren Canan, Michelle Conder - Страница 12

CHAPTER FOUR

FROM WITHIN THE shadowed interior of the car, Dimitri fixed his gaze on the café opposite. He had been tempted to go inside, to discover what his son’s world was really like, but had decided against it—despite his uncanny ability to blend into the background when required. His mouth thinned. Russian men were taught from an early age how to lose themselves in the shadows and he had always managed it better than most, despite his distinctively powerful build and the pale blue eyes he had been told were unforgettable.

He could see Tara standing behind the counter, slicing cheese and making sandwiches. He had met Erin’s sister only once before, years ago, and she hadn’t seemed to approve of him. Maybe that was why he had been so surprised to receive her phone call. She hadn’t been particularly friendly as she’d haltingly explained that Erin was getting married the following week. When he’d asked her outright why she was bothering to tell him, she had refused to be drawn further, but her attitude hadn’t bothered him. He was used to women disliking him if they felt he’d taken advantage of them, or, in this case, of their beloved sister. But the fact remained that he had done nothing he was ashamed of. He had taken Erin to bed because she had been practically begging him to and because the chemistry between them had been so explosive that night. Who would ever have guessed that his unassuming little secretary would have been so damned hot? Or that she had given him the best sex of his life?

But while her allure had surprised him, he had decided against a repeat performance because he remembered the way she’d made him feel when he had opened his eyes to see her lying beside him. He remembered feeling uncomfortable as her shining gaze had met his. Because this was Erin. Erin who knew him better than any other woman. Not someone he’d picked up in a nightclub or at a party, but the woman he spent most of his waking hours with. He had felt naked in more ways than one as she had smiled at him dreamily and something unfamiliar had stabbed at his heart. For the first and only time in his life he had realised he couldn’t get away with his usual smooth and meaningless post-conquest dialogue. He had broken the rule of a lifetime of mixing work with pleasure and he should have known better.

But Tara’s news about her sister’s impending wedding had been underpinned with a note in her voice which had alerted his interest. He began to wonder why she’d told him something so seemingly innocuous, when, presumably, legions of his ex-lovers were going off and getting married all the time. There had been something dark and secretive in her tone. Something which had made him pick up the phone to speak with the security firm he had little need of these days.

‘Just take a quiet look at a woman called Erin Turner and see what she’s up to,’ Dimitri had suggested to the head of the firm.

He remembered the expressionless look on the man’s face when he had walked into his office a few days later with an envelope which contained a clutch of photos. Photos of a child who looked just like him.

Forcing the memory away, he saw Erin standing in the doorway of the café and watched his driver get out of the car to take her suitcase from her. Dimitri watched as she approached and, inexplicably, his heart began to pound.

She had removed most of the heavy eye make-up she’d been wearing for the wedding and, without the elaborate pearl-studded wedding hairstyle, she looked more like the Erin of old. Her faded jeans were unremarkable and so were her beat-up sneakers. She was wearing a forgettable little waterproof jacket, with some ugly fake fur around the collar, and her long brown hair was tied back in a ponytail, which blew wildly in the strong autumn wind.

His groin grew heavy with lust and Dimitri was irritated by his own reaction, because he didn’t understand it. She was ordinary. Some people might have said that she made no effort to attract a man. She didn’t dress to impress—clothes had never been high on her list of priorities, even when she’d occupied the prestigious position of being his secretary. So why the sudden urge to crush her lips beneath his and to press himself down on that narrow-hipped body? Was it simply a case of anger being a potent aphrodisiac—or was he remembering that her forgettable looks had been forgotten when she’d come alive in his arms?

The driver opened the door and she got in beside him, a chill breeze accompanying her. He wondered if he was imagining her faint look of disappointment when she saw him sitting in the shadows.

‘Hoping I might have changed my mind and left you alone?’ he questioned silkily.

Clear green eyes met his. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘Actually, I was.’

‘Sorry to disappoint you, milaya moya,’ he said sarcastically, and his jaw tightened. ‘What time does he get home?’

A look of anxiety crossed her face as she glanced down at her watch. ‘Soon. In fact, very soon. We ought to get going.’

Dimitri hesitated as a wave of something he didn’t recognise washed over him with a fierce kind of power.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’

‘He mustn’t see me,’ she said and suddenly her voice sounded urgent. ‘He mustn’t.’

‘He won’t,’ he clipped back, impatient now. ‘If he looks at anything, it will be at the car, not the passengers. If you’re that worried, you can slide down the seat so that you’re completely out of view.’

‘But why?’ she questioned. ‘Why risk it?’

Why indeed? Even Dimitri was perplexed by his own reaction. Was it just to convince himself it was true—because he was the kind of man who liked to see the evidence with his own eyes? Or because his love of risk wasn’t as deeply buried as he’d thought?

He stretched his fingers out and then bent them so that the knuckles cracked and it sounded almost deafening in the close confines of the car. ‘We’ll wait five minutes,’ he said. ‘And if he hasn’t appeared by then, we’ll go.’

He could feel her tension rising as the minutes ticked by. He could see it in the stiff set of her shoulders and he felt a grim kind of pleasure as she began to shift nervously in her seat. Now might she understand how it felt to be powerless?

‘Please, Dimitri,’ she said.

But then something in her posture changed—softened—it was like a flower opening to the sun. Following the direction of her gaze, he looked out of the window as a little boy ran along the road with an unknown woman trying to keep up behind him, carrying a plastic lunch box in one hand and a flapping piece of paper in the other.

Dimitri froze as he caught a glimpse of the boy’s pale eyes and dark golden hair and bizarrely found his mind flashing back to his own childhood. He remembered the professional photo his parents used to insist on being taken every year on his birthday—stiff-looking portraits where nobody was smiling. There hadn’t been a lot to smile about, despite the wealth and the lavish home and the servants.

But this little boy...

His heart clenched.

This little boy was laughing as he pushed open the door and disappeared inside the café. His features looked so like Dimitri’s own and yet they were completely different—transformed by a wave of sheer happiness.

Dimitri swallowed, but that did nothing to shift the dryness in his throat. He had expected to feel nothing but distance when he first saw the child—and hadn’t part of him wanted that? He knew how much easier it would be if he could just turn his back and walk away from them both. Erin would doubtless be delighted to see the back of him. And even more delighted not to have to endure two days in a strange country with a man who was still so angry with her. He could speak to his bank and arrange to have the child funded until he was eighteen. If he performed well at school or showed some of his father’s natural acumen, there was no reason why he shouldn’t be given a role within Dimitri’s organisation. And if he proved himself worthy, there was no reason why one day he shouldn’t inherit some—maybe all—of Dimitri’s vast fortune, for he had never planned for himself the traditional route of marriage and fatherhood.

So why was that impartial assessment not happening? Why was there a stab of something deep in his heart which he couldn’t quite define? A feeling of pride and possessiveness, like the day when he’d picked up his first super-yacht—only this was stronger. Much, much stronger.

His breathing wasn’t quite steady as he pressed a button recessed in the armrest and the car pulled away.

Erin breathed out a sigh of relief as the café began to retreat into the distance. For one awful moment she’d thought that Leo might see her. Come running over and ask why Mummy was back so early and what was she doing in the big, shiny car with that strange man.

She snatched a glance at Dimitri’s profile.

‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.

‘For what?’ he demanded.

‘For not speaking to him.’

He gave a short and bitter laugh. ‘What did you expect me to do—rush up and introduce myself? Hi, Leo, I’m your long-lost daddy!’

‘Is that what you wanted to do?’

Dimitri didn’t answer. His instinct was to tell her that it was none of her damned business what he wanted to do. But even he could see that it was.

He studied the pale oval of her face and the green eyes, which were surveying him so steadily. ‘No, it’s not what I wanted,’ he said flatly. ‘What I really wanted was to convince myself that it was all some kind of bad dream. That I would look at him and realise there had been some kind of mistake—that you just happen to have a penchant for lovers with hard bodies and high cheekbones and that I was just a number in a possible list of fathers.’

‘But now?’ she said.

His lips hardened and all the arguments which he might have brought against another woman could not, he realised, be applied to Erin. Because the accusation that she had deliberately fallen pregnant in order to trap him could never be levelled against her. She had not come sniffing around his vast fortune—demanding marriage or regular payments for his son. On the contrary, she had done the exact opposite.

‘I don’t know,’ he said suddenly, in as rare and as honest an admission of confusion as he had ever made—something he could only attribute to the shock of being confronted by his own flesh and blood. ‘For while the logical part of my brain continues to tell me I have no desire for a child of my own—there is another part...a part which is more powerful. The part programmed by nature to perpetuate the species. To carry my own, unique genes forward into the future.’

Her face contorted, as if she’d just bitten into something very sour.

‘Is that all he is to you, Dimitri—a product of your gene pool?’

‘How else do you expect me to react?’ he demanded. ‘You have given me no opportunity to get to know him. You deny me even the knowledge of his existence. What did you imagine I would feel when I found out, Erin? Only, I was never expected to find out, was I, you cold-hearted little bitch? You would have kept it from me until I had drawn the last breath from my body.’

She flinched. ‘I don’t want this to deteriorate into a slanging match.’

‘At this precise moment I don’t particularly care what you want, but you will hear me out,’ he said icily. ‘Do you think I approve of the way you’ve reared my son? To see him making his home in a place like that?’

‘Externals aren’t everything,’ she flared back defensively. ‘And at least I managed to bring him up to be happy and healthy.’

‘But you could have done much more than manage,’ he argued. ‘You could have come to me for help. A man who was in a position to help you properly—so that you wouldn’t have to struggle bringing up my son in an apartment over a café and having to make a sham marriage because you needed money.’

His words brought Erin to her senses. What was she doing, letting him browbeat her like this? She knew enough of Dimitri to realise that he would take control in any situation if she let him, because that was his default setting. And she couldn’t afford to let him. Not over this.

‘You know exactly why I didn’t come to you,’ she said quietly.

‘Because I never wanted children?’

‘That was one of the reasons. I...’ She halted, suddenly at a loss. What has Tara done? she thought bitterly. What serpent has she unleashed here?

She swallowed as the enormity of her actions came crashing home in a way it had never done before. Or maybe she had just never allowed herself to think about it properly. She tried putting herself in his shoes and imagining how she would feel if the situation were reversed. Like him, she would be spitting mad and hurt and angry. Had her action of not telling him been motivated simply out of protectiveness for Leo, or had she also been protecting her own vulnerable heart?

Yes.

Yes, she had.

His dark world was not one she wanted her son growing up in. She wanted Leo to remain sunny and innocent—not be dark and complicated like his father. Yet as she looked into Dimitri’s proud face she thought she saw a flash of something she didn’t recognise in the depths of those icy eyes. Something almost...vulnerable. She gave herself a little shake, telling herself that it was a trick of the light. Because that was a mistake she’d made before. The Russian didn’t do vulnerable. He did hard and inviolate and proud.

But none of those facts impacted on the way she was currently feeling—an emotion which felt uncomfortably close to guilt.

‘I should have told you,’ she said slowly.

He gave the ghost of a smile, as if another small battle had been won. ‘Why didn’t you?’

Erin shook her head. It was difficult to think straight when he was this close. Tara had told her that she’d rung Dimitri because there was the possibility that he might have changed. But what if he hadn’t? What if his world was as dark and dangerous as before? And suddenly the truth came blurting out—the memory having the power to hurt her, even now.

‘But I did try to tell you. Don’t you remember?’

His eyes narrowed and he shook his head. ‘When?’

‘I came round to your home one Saturday morning, because I felt it best to tell you away from the office. It was just over two months since we’d slept together.’ She paused to let her words sink in. ‘I suppose it was my own fault. If I’d waited until midday, you might have been alone.’

She had been scared, naïve, foolish, hopeful. It had been ten weeks since she’d spent the night with him. Ten weeks since he’d taken her virginity without realising and then acted as if nothing had happened. He had gone away to Russia on business and then on to the United States. She had suspected that he was deliberately putting distance between them. The weeks had drifted by and her contact with him had been limited to the strictly impersonal. To telephone calls and emails. Clearly he regretted that momentary lapse, which had started with an unexpected kiss and had ended with him thrusting into her over his dining-room table.

She thought at first that her period was late because of the stress and the emotion of having broken the professional boundaries by sleeping with her boss. But her aching breasts were not so easy to ignore. And then she’d missed a second period and had done the test—sitting on the floor of her bathroom and staring at it in disbelief. She knew straight away that she had to tell Dimitri, but she had been so confused. And frightened. She’d blocked out thoughts of how he might react, but one thing she had known above all else was that she wanted to keep this baby. And that her feelings for her boss were secondary to that one fundamental truth.

But Dimitri was away travelling and she was aware she couldn’t tell him something like that over the phone, or by email. Apart from anything else, she was terrified it might be intercepted or overheard. On escalating tenterhooks, she waited until he flew in and phoned to say he would be back in the office first thing Monday. She tried to blot out the fact that a new distance seemed to have entered his voice, and that he sounded cool when he spoke to her. And that was when she’d known that she couldn’t wait a moment longer and she couldn’t tell him at work. She would go round to his apartment and tell him face-to-face, because there was never going to be anything like a ‘perfect’ time to break the news that she was carrying his baby.

She had—foolishly, in retrospect—gone to a lot of trouble with her appearance that morning. She’d washed her hair and applied a little more make-up than usual. She’d put on a dress, because, she remembered, it had been a sunny spring day—but it hadn’t been as warm outside as it had looked from the window of her apartment, and she remembered her bare legs being covered in goosebumps. Afterwards she’d wondered whether she had stupidly been hoping for some romantic conclusion to her news. That he would sweep her into his arms and look down at her with shining eyes, and tell her that it was all going to be okay.

Of course she had.

But he had taken ages to answer the door and, when he had, he had been bad-tempered, sleepy and half naked, his icy eyes narrowed and bloodshot, and his hard jaw shadowed with growth.

‘What is it, Erin?’ he questioned impatiently, zipping up his jeans with a slight wince. ‘Can’t it wait?’

She had walked into his apartment, noting the general scene of disarray which greeted her. There was an empty champagne bottle lying on the floor and another which was half drunk—standing on the same table where he had taken her virginity. Now was probably not the right moment to tell him that he was going to be a daddy, but what choice did she have? Tell him on Monday—trying desperately to squeeze in the unwelcome news between wall-to-wall meetings?

It took her a moment or two to notice the various items of female underwear strewn around the room because she was too busy ogling the lurid cover of what looked like a porn film. She remembered colour flooding to her cheeks as she recalled the picture of a woman wearing very little other than a leather thong and wielding some sort of whip, with a scary look in her eyes. Erin had little experience of men and what they got up to in their leisure time, but even she could work out what had been going on.

And it was then that a woman had appeared from the bedroom, making Erin feel like the biggest fool in the world, because the the woman was completely naked. Her long blonde hair was mussed, her eyes all smudged with mascara and her large breasts jiggled provocatively as she walked into the reception room—completely ignoring Erin—and pouted at Dimitri.

‘Aren’t you coming back to bed, lyubimiy?’

The fact that she was obviously Russian had only made it worse—if it was possible for such a situation to get any more dire than it already was. Erin saw the expression on Dimitri’s face—a mixture of irritation at being interrupted and an unmistakable look of lust, which had automatically darkened his eyes.

‘Go back to bed and I’ll be there in a minute,’ he said, before fixing Erin with an enquiring look. ‘So what is it, Erin? What do you want?’

‘I...’ Erin had been at a loss; her words tailing off until the blonde had wiggled her way back towards the bedroom and she had been momentarily transfixed by the retreating sight of her pale, globe-like buttocks.

‘Look.’ He paused, as if searching for the right words to say, but of course there were no right words. ‘I think we both know what happened that night was a mistake and if you were hoping for some kind of repeat—’

‘No! No, of course I wasn’t,’ she said, forcing some stupid, meaningless smile onto her lips as she realised there was only one direction she could contemplate taking. ‘I came here to hand in my notice.’

Was that relief she saw on his face? Was it?

‘You’re sure about that?’

Erin nodded. And the fact that he didn’t try to talk her out of it spoke volumes. She had fooled herself into thinking she was his indispensable ally—the woman he couldn’t do without. And yet she was so wrong. She had become an embarrassment, she recognised. The frumpy secretary he’d stupidly bedded in a mad moment when he hadn’t been thinking straight. Had he been afraid that she was going to start mooning around after him at the office and becoming a sexual nuisance? Was that why he had uncharacteristically absented himself from England for so long?

‘I’d like to leave immediately, if that’s okay with you,’ she said, as briskly as possible. ‘I can easily find someone to step in for me.’

His eyebrows had winged upwards. ‘You mean you’ve had a better offer?’

‘Much better,’ she lied.

He smiled slightly, as if he understood that. But she guessed he did. Dimitri understood ambition and power and climbing the ladder towards the ever-higher pinnacle of success—it was feelings he was bad at.

But he had made a stab at expressing regret—even if he had done it badly.

‘I want you to know that I’ve...’ He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. ‘Well, I’ve enjoyed working with you these past years.’

The easiest thing to have done would have been to have withdrawn gracefully before he probed any further and worked out for himself that there was no other job. Murmured something polite before she walked away for good, so that she could leave on amicable terms. But Erin cared about Dimitri, no matter how much she told herself he didn’t deserve it. She had looked into his haunted and sleep-deprived eyes and, although she found herself wishing she could take his unknown pain away, deep down she knew she couldn’t save him. He was the only person who could do that. But didn’t she owe him her honesty—if not about her future, then surely about his own? To give him a few home truths, in a way which few other people would ever have dared. To tell him that he might not have a future if he didn’t start changing.

‘And I’ve enjoyed working for you, for the most part,’ she said quietly. ‘Actually, I used to admire and respect you very much.’

His eyes narrowed, as if he had misheard her. He knitted together the dark eyebrows which contrasted so vividly with the deep gold of his hair. ‘Used to?’

‘Sorry to use the past tense,’ she said, not sounding sorry at all. ‘But it’s hard to admire someone who is behaving like an idiot.’

‘An idiot?’ he echoed incredulously.

It hadn’t been easy to continue, but she had forced herself to finish what she’d started. ‘What else would you call someone who lives the way you do?’ she demanded. ‘Who goes from day to day on a knife edge, taking all kinds of unnecessary risks? How long do you think your body will survive on too much booze and not enough sleep? How long before your lifestyle impacts on your ability to make razor-sharp business decisions? You’re not indestructible, Dimitri—even if you think you are.’

She curled her lips in disgust as she shot the messy room one last withering look—though if he’d been a little more perceptive he might have noticed the distress in her eyes, which had made her start sobbing her heart out the moment she got home to her lovely apartment.

She remembered raising her head from one of the tear-soaked cushions and looking around the luxury home which Dimitri’s generous salary had enabled her to rent, knowing that this kind of lifestyle would soon be a thing of the past. Because she wasn’t rich and she shouldn’t pretend otherwise. She had simply worked for a rich man and now she carried his child beneath her heart while he looked at her with impatient eyes—eager to get back to one of the sexiest women she had ever seen.

‘You came round to my apartment and gave me a piece of your mind,’ said Dimitri slowly, his voice breaking into her thoughts and bringing Erin right back to the present. To the luxury car heading towards the city and the man whose icy eyes were boring into her. She looked deep into their pale glitter.

‘And found you with another woman,’ she said.

Dimitri nodded. Yes, she had found him with another woman. Someone whose face he couldn’t even remember, let alone her name. There had been a lot of women like that. One beautiful blonde merging into another, like a blurred and naked merry-go-round whirling through his life and his bedroom.

But he did remember the look of disgust on Erin’s face and his instinctive fury that she should dare to judge him. What right did she have to judge him? She had made out that she was some paragon of virtue—but she hadn’t been so damned virtuous when her nails had been raking his naked back and urging him into her sticky warmth, had she? She had certainly blown her goody-two-shoes image right out of the sky that night.

But even though he’d told himself he didn’t care what Erin Turner thought about him—he’d found himself thinking about the things she’d said. And there had been a lot of time to consider them during those fruitless months spent seeking a replacement secretary who came even close to her abilities.

His mind cleared as he stared into the clear green light of her eyes.

‘And that was enough to prevent you from telling me you were pregnant, was it?’ he demanded. ‘A simple case of sexual jealousy—because you found me with another woman?’

Erin didn’t say anything. Not at first. He made her sound unreasonable—as if she’d simply acted out of pique because her pride had been hurt. But it hadn’t just been about the naked blonde. Of much greater concern had been his chaotic lifestyle which might not have changed. And if that was the case, she would protect Leo from him with every last breath in her body. She had agreed to spend a weekend with him because she’d been in a position of weakness, but she was not going to be cowed into behaving like a victim. So why not tell him the truth? She had nothing left to lose...

‘There was nothing simple about it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want my child to be part of your world.’

His blue eyes were like ice. ‘And you were to be the judge and the jury?’

She shrugged. ‘Why not? Nobody else ever dared tell you the truth—or if they did, you didn’t bother listening to them. Loukas Sarantos told you often enough, before he left your employment.’ And suddenly she realised that something else about him was different, and she screwed up her face in confusion as she remembered the eternal shadowy presence which had never been far from his side. ‘Where’s your bodyguard?’ she asked. ‘You never go anywhere without a bodyguard.’

‘Not any more.’ A faint smile lifted the edges of his lips. ‘Surprised, Erin?’

‘A little.’ She nodded. ‘Actually, more than a little. What happened?’

He shrugged. ‘After Loukas left I could never find anyone else I could bear to have around me 24/7—you know that. And then you left, too.’

Her word fell like a stone into the silence which followed. ‘And?’

He glanced out of the window at the stop-start traffic. ‘And I realised I was sick of the press dogging my every move and everyone standing on the sidelines waiting for me to tip over the edge.’ He turned back to her again. ‘So I decided to tie up a few loose ends—actually, more than a few. I cleaned up my act and became Mr Respectable.’

‘You?’ she echoed. ‘Respectable?’

He gave another mirthless smile. ‘An image you probably find as difficult to process as much as I do the thought of you as a mother.’

‘Touché.’ She sighed, wishing she had some kind of magic wand to wave. But if she did, what would she wish for? That she’d never met him? If she wished for that, then she wouldn’t have Leo—and she couldn’t bear that. ‘So what now?’ she questioned.

There was a pause as his gaze flicked over her.

‘My car is going to drop me off at my office and then it will take you out to the airport, to one of the hotels there. I’ve had Sofia book you into a suite.’

She looked at him blankly. ‘A hotel?’

‘Of course. We’re flying out first thing and it makes sense for you to be close to the airport. You’re masquerading as my secretary, Erin—where else would you go? You can’t stay home—and you surely weren’t expecting to spend the night with me?’

His sarcastic words stung her and made a dull rush of colour stab at her cheeks, but the worst thing of all was that they touched on the truth. Had she thought he would be taking her back to that elegant, bonsai-filled apartment of his where there were more than enough spare bedrooms? Maybe she had—when the truth of it was that since he’d kissed her so coldly yet so passionately in the register office, he hadn’t come near her.

She tried to mirror the faint cruelty of his smile. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Dimitri,’ she said. ‘I’m not a complete sucker for punishment.’