Billionaires: The Daredevil: Claimed for Makarov's Baby / Defying the Billionaire's Command / Redeeming the Billionaire SEAL

She pushed away her cup before looking up at her sister with bewildered eyes. ‘The only thing I can’t work out is how he found out about the wedding.’

There was a pause, and when Tara spoke it was in a voice Erin didn’t recognise.

‘I told him.’

For the second time that day Erin’s heart felt as if it had been crushed by an iron fist. For a moment she just sat there frozen with shock, before her breath exploded from her mouth. ‘You told him?’ she echoed. ‘You told Dimitri about the wedding? You?’

‘Yes,’ said Tara.

‘What, you just tracked him down and phoned him up and announced that he had a son?’

‘He was easy enough to find—he owns half of London, for heaven’s sake! Getting through to him was the tricky part but once I mentioned your name, he took the call straight away. But I didn’t say anything about Leo, I promise you that, Erin. I just told him you were getting married. I didn’t breathe a word about his son.’

‘Then how come he knew he had one?’

‘I don’t know!’ snapped Tara. ‘And before you say anything else—I’m glad I did it. Yes—glad!’

Erin felt sick. Her sister was the closest person she had, next to Leo—the person she would have trusted most in the world—and she had betrayed her to the man she feared most. She had unleashed a powerful secret without knowing where it would take them.

‘Why would you be glad about something like that?’ she questioned dully.

‘You know why,’ said Tara softly. ‘Because you were breaking the law by marrying Chico so that he could get a work permit and I was worried about the fallout if that ever got out. Because Dimitri might have changed—and shouldn’t you at least give him the chance to show you whether he has? But mainly because Leo...’

Her words tailed off and Erin’s head jerked back, anger and hurt blending together to form a potent cocktail of emotion as she stared at her sister.

‘Because Leo what?’ she questioned coldly.

Tara swallowed. ‘Leo deserves to know who his father is. He does, Erin. Don’t you ever feel guilty that he doesn’t even know?’

‘Of course I do!’ Erin’s hissed words were so fervent that they startled her as much as they evidently startled Tara. ‘But life isn’t black and white. You know exactly why I did it. I didn’t want my son to be brought up in the kind of world which Dimitri inhabits.’

‘I didn’t hear you objecting when you worked for him.’

Erin didn’t answer. No, that much was true. Because she’d loved her job and had been dazzled by the trust he’d placed in her. So she’d turned a blind eye to all the whispers and rumours about the Russian oligarch. Even when her eyes had been opened to the kind of man he really was, even when the scales had fallen away and she’d seen the dark soul at his core, it hadn’t made any difference. And wasn’t that the worst part of all—that she had wanted to reach out to help clear that darkness away instead of running as fast as she could in the opposite direction? What a fool she’d been. Because all that had happened was that her altruism had been misinterpreted by a man who didn’t seem to know what kindness was—and had ended up with them having sex. Sex which had meant nothing to him.

‘And he’s been getting some very good press lately,’ continued Tara. ‘I’m sure I read that he’s built a laboratory to investigate childhood diseases, somewhere in Russia. In fact, I think he’s set up some sort of charitable foundation in his name. Maybe he’s a reformed character.’

Erin kicked the tip of her white wedding shoe against the counter and for once Tara didn’t object. ‘Leopards don’t change their spots,’ she said flatly. ‘Everyone knows that.’

‘Maybe they don’t,’ said Tara quietly. ‘But even leopards can adapt—otherwise you wouldn’t find them living in zoos.’

‘I hate zoos,’ said Erin, sliding down from the stool and staring at her sister. ‘And I still can’t believe you told him.’

‘I did it because I love you,’ said Tara simply. ‘And one day you might even thank me for it.’

With an angry shake of her head, Erin went upstairs to the room she shared with Leo. She’d done her best to smarten it up, with pale walls and rows of books which she encouraged her clever son to read—but the cramped dimensions reminded her that this way of living couldn’t continue indefinitely. Her gaze lingered on the framed photos of Leo at various milestones in his life—from chubby and very demanding infant right up to his first day of school, last year. She studied that one the hardest, her eyes scanning his innocent little face—so full of hope and happiness—and her heart clenched with a sense of having completely messed things up.

Kicking off her shoes, she changed into her own clothes, wondering how she must have appeared to Dimitri after all these years. Had she changed much? She stared into the mirror. Of course she had. Even the most liberal of observers would have described her appearance as bizarre, and nobody had ever accused Dimitri of being liberal.

Her green eyes were fringed with more make-up than usual and her hair was still woven into a complex updo, studded with the fake-pearl pins which she’d bought from the cash-and-carry to try to emphasise her bridal status. All that time spent angsting over her decision and all the trouble she’d gone to, trying to look like a pukka bride—and it had all been over before it had even begun. Viciously, she tugged the pins out, one by one, until her long brown hair floated free and her thoughts were spinning as she began to brush it.

She had to get a grip. She had agreed on a course of action and she was going to stick to it, with as little fuss and emotion as possible. She would accompany the Russian to Jazratan and pretend to be his secretary. The two of them would talk candidly about Leo and maybe Dimitri would realise that having a child just wouldn’t fit into his lifestyle. That there was a good reason why he’d never wanted any children of his own.

And was it a terrible thing to admit that a part of her hoped that would be the case? Because wouldn’t that be easier all round? No uneasy meetings. No thoughts about the future. No sizzling sexual chemistry. She put the hairbrush down and gave her reflection a defiant stare.

She would handle it.

She had to.

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?