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Erin saw something which almost looked like pleasure flickering in his icy eyes and she remembered that dissent was something he was used to dealing with. Something he seemed almost to enjoy. Because dissent implied battle and Dimitri Makarov always won the battles he fought.
‘You can manage perfectly well?’ he questioned softly.
‘Yes,’ she said, aware on some level that she was walking into a trap, but not knowing exactly where that trap lay.
‘So how come I found you standing in a cheap wedding dress, about to break the law?’
She licked her lips but didn’t answer.
‘Why, Erin?’
‘I had my reasons.’
‘And I want to hear them.’
She hesitated, knowing she could procrastinate no longer. ‘Leo and I live with my sister. She owns a café in Bow.’
‘I know that.’
Had her face registered her shock and surprise? ‘How could you possibly know that?’
‘I had some of my people investigate you.’
‘You had what? Why?’ She could hear her voice beginning to tremble. ‘Why would you do something like that?’
‘Because of the child, of course.’ His pale eyes narrowed into icy shards. ‘Why else?’
‘How did you find out about Leo?’
‘The means are irrelevant,’ he snapped. ‘Just accept that I did. Now, where were we?’
Her heart sinking, she stared at him, knowing that she was trapped. ‘Leo goes to a local school and he’s doing very well, but...’
He bit out the words like bullets. ‘But what?’
She tried to keep the fear from her voice. The fear that she wasn’t doing the best for the golden child who had inherited so many of his father’s qualities.
‘He’s good at sport and there just aren’t the facilities where we live. The nearest park is a good bus ride away and Tara and I are often too busy working in the café to take him. You remember Tara? She’s my sister.’
‘I remember,’ he said tightly.
She drew in a deep breath, hoping to see some softening or understanding on the granite features, but there was none. And suddenly she wanted him to understand that there were reasons why she’d agreed to the marriage today. Good reasons. ‘Chico comes from a rich family in Brazil and wants to stay in England. He offered me a large sum of money to marry him, so that he could get a work permit. I was planning on using the money to resettle. To...to take Leo to the countryside and live somewhere with a garden. Somewhere he could kick a ball around and get plenty of fresh air and exercise. I...I want him to have that kind of life.’
Still his face showed no sign of reaction as he walked over to the large fireplace and pressed a bell recessed into the wall beside it. Moments later, a young woman appeared—a beautiful, cool blonde. Of course she was blonde. Every woman in the Russian’s life, bar Erin, was fair—sporting every shade in the spectrum from spun gold to moonbeam pale, because Dimitri needed blondes in the same way other men needed to breathe. Her flaxen hair was cut into a soft bob and her high cheekbones marked her out as Slavic, so it came as no surprise when Dimitri spoke to her in Russian. She glanced briefly over at Erin and nodded, before turning on her high-heeled shoes and leaving the room again.
Still Dimitri said nothing and in a way his silence was far more intimidating than if he’d continued to subject her to a barrage of angry questions. Would she ever be able to convince him that she’d tried to act in everyone’s best interests?
Erin was surprised when the blonde returned a few minutes later, carrying a pair of jeans and a cashmere sweater over her arm. She walked across the room and, placing them on the table in front of her, she smiled.
‘I think they will fit you,’ she said, her cut-glass English accent seeming to contradict the fluent Russian she’d used moments before. ‘But I have a belt you can use if the jeans are too big.’
‘Spasiba, Sofia,’ growled Dimitri, watching as the blonde left the room with that same confident wiggle.
Erin stared at the clothes. ‘What are these for?’
‘What do they look like they’re for? Sofia is lending you some of her own clothes,’ he said. ‘Put them on. I’m taking you home and I want as few people as possible seeing you. A woman leaving my apartment wearing a wedding dress would be bound to get the press excited, and I make a point of steering clear of the newspapers these days.’
Erin narrowed her eyes. Was that why he hadn’t featured in any of his famous post-nightclub shots with a half-clothed woman in tow recently? Was he getting better at hiding his seedy lifestyle?
She felt like refusing his autocratic demand to wear someone else’s clothes but she was cold now and she was starting to shiver. Maybe it was reaction. ‘Okay, I’ll put the jeans on,’ she said, from between chattering teeth. ‘But I don’t need you to take me home afterwards. I’m perfectly capable of catching the bus.’
‘I don’t think you quite understand the situation, Erin,’ he said coldly. ‘Unless you are trying to be coy, thinking I might take pity on you and let you go. Because that’s not going to happen. So let me spell it out for you, so that you get the message loud and clear.’ His eyes glittered like early-morning sun on ice. ‘I am taking you home so that I can meet my son.’
CHAPTER THREE
‘YOU CAN’T,’ SAID Erin fervently as the limousine gathered speed, and she turned to look at Dimitri, who was sitting like some granite-faced sentry in the back seat beside her. Sofia’s designer jeans were indeed too big but the baby-blue sweater hugged her nicely and now she was warmer she felt more in control. She made one last attempt to appeal to the Russian’s better nature, even if deep in her heart she knew he didn’t have one. ‘You can’t just turn up out of the blue and introduce yourself to a six-year-old boy and tell him you’re his long-lost father.’
‘Just watch me,’ he said grimly.
Erin heard the harsh note in his voice and was reminded of his fierce reputation. Not that he had minded. He always maintained that a fierce reputation kept fools at a distance and for a long time she had been flattered by that statement and its implication. Because she had been one of the few people he’d allowed to get close to him—and hadn’t that made her think she meant more to him than she actually did? Oh, the foolish longings of a rich man’s secretary!
‘Think about it, Dimitri,’ she said quietly.
‘What do you think I’ve been doing?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve done nothing but think about it since I was first shown a photograph of the boy.’
‘And when was that?’
‘Seven days ago,’ he snapped.
She nodded, determined not to let him sweep her aside with the force of his anger, knowing she had to fight her little boy’s corner here. For his sake. For all their sakes. ‘Leo doesn’t know you—’
‘And whose fault is that?’
A wave of remorse washed over her and suddenly her decision didn’t seem quite so clear-cut. Because Dimitri did seem different. The clear-eyed man in the pristine suit was light years away from the stubble-jawed and hungover man who used to arrive at the office demanding strong coffee. ‘Mine,’ she admitted. ‘But I did it with the best intentions.’
‘I don’t care about your intentions, Erin,’ he said, his voice dipping. ‘I just care about what is mine. And this child is my flesh and blood, too, not just yours.’
His unashamed possessiveness sent a ripple of alarm through her and Erin recognised that once a piece of information was out there, you couldn’t get it back. And you couldn’t control the outcome, either. Dimitri was here and—judging from the grim expression on his face—he was here to stay.
‘If you really care about him,’ she said, ‘then you must take it slowly. Imagine how it would feel if you suddenly exploded into his life without warning.’
‘You should have considered that before, shouldn’t you?’
The car drew up in front of a set of red traffic lights and a man on a bike raced past them, using the inside lane. Erin listened to the blare of horns which greeted the cyclist’s action as she thought how best to get Dimitri to see sense. He liked facts, didn’t he? Hard, cold facts. So present them to him.
She sucked in a deep breath. ‘You always used to say you had no desire to be a father.’
‘Given the choice,’ came his flat response. ‘Which I haven’t been.’
‘And what if that’s still true? You might meet him and wish you never had. It might reinforce all the worst things you ever thought about fatherhood. And if that were the case, wouldn’t it be hard for you to walk away and even harder for him to pretend that the meeting had never happened?’
Dimitri’s lips tightened as her words struck an unwanted chord, thinking how well she knew him—better perhaps than anyone else. What if he met the child, but could not meet the boy’s expectations? What if the boy wanted love from him—real love—and commitment? Could he take that risk, knowing that he could provide none of those things?
‘What are you suggesting?’ he demanded.
She met his gaze without flinching. ‘I don’t know you any more. I have to be sure that you’re no longer the man you used to be. You have to convince me that you’ve changed. I don’t want Leo mixing with gamblers or heavy drinkers, or witnessing a stream of women parading their bodies in front of him.’
His mouth twisted. ‘You mean you want to vet me?’
‘Can you blame me?’ she retorted. ‘But we also need to discuss what to say to him. If you’re going to meet Leo after all this time, we need to present a united front.’
Dimitri felt his body tense as she stated her demands. As if what she wanted was the only thing which mattered. There was no sense of remorse that she’d kept this information from him for so long, was there? Not a flicker of it...
Anger bubbled up inside him and suddenly he felt the need to lash out. Without thinking, he caught hold of her arms—thinking how slim they felt beneath the borrowed sweater. She jerked her head back in surprise so that the light caught the cheap, fake pearls which were woven into her hair. Her lips were parted, her green eyes were dark and, although her face was wary, he realised that she still wanted him. That in the midst of everything, there was desire. Of course there was. No female remained immune to him for long. He could feel sexual hunger pulsating in the air around them as his gaze flickered to the twin thrust of her nipples pinpointing against the soft wool of the sweater. He thought how easy it would be to burrow his hands beneath. To caress those hard little nubs with the skill which could sometimes make a woman come, just by doing that. For a nanosecond he was tempted beyond measure, his fingers longing to creep over those tiny mounds and play with them.
Until he remembered that this was the woman who had deliberately concealed his son from him. Who had written him out of her life as if he no longer existed. How could he possibly desire a woman like that? Abruptly, he dropped his hands, wondering if she was aware that disappointment was written all over her face as he did so. A flicker of triumph coursed through him as she bit her lip and he took a moment to enjoy her obvious frustration.
‘So what were you planning to do after your wedding?’ he questioned. ‘Were you coming back here to the café with your new husband to parade your shiny new ring for all to see?’
‘No. We’d...we’d planned to spend a long weekend at a hotel in the country. Chico took my suitcase down there yesterday.’
‘For your honeymoon?’ he scorned.
‘I suppose you could call it that. It was intended to make our marriage seem more authentic to the authorities, that was all.’
‘So Leo knows about the wedding?’
There was silence for a moment. ‘Of course he does,’ she said. ‘He likes Chico. We were... We were all going to live together in a lovely house in the country.’
‘A fake marriage to a gay man—with separate rooms, I presume?’ he said. ‘How the hell was that supposed to work?’
‘We would have made it work,’ she defended. ‘I was thinking about Leo’s future. About giving him the financial security I could never guarantee him!’
‘What kind of example is that to set for a child?’ he demanded bitterly, because he was discovering a nerve which was still raw, even after all these years. ‘Basing your life on lies and deception?’
Nervously, she glanced out of the window. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more. At least, not now,’ she said, her voice growing strained. ‘Because we’re nearly there.’
He followed the direction of her gaze to the grey, treeless streets outside. ‘And will my son be there?’
She flinched a little, as if it hurt to hear him use the possessive phrase. Well, tough, he thought grimly. She was going to have to get used to a lot more than that.
‘No. He’ll still be at school. He won’t be back for a couple of hours.’
Dimitri flexed his fingers as he forced himself to think about practicalities, because he could see that she was right. He couldn’t just burst in, unannounced—and although it went against his every instinct, he could see that the process should be gradual. Yet his discovery about the boy could not have come at a worse time, because he was due to travel to Jazratan tomorrow, for some delicate end-stage negotiations with the Sheikh of that oil-rich land. It was a deal which had been a long time in the making, and Saladin Al Mektala was not a man whose presence you could postpone. But Dimitri recognised suddenly that this discovery was more important than any deal—and the realisation surprised him almost as much as the unexpected twist of his heart when he thought of his unknown son. Because he was a man who put business above everything—who never allowed his personal life to intrude on his material ambitions.
He glanced at Erin, but she wasn’t looking at him. Her head was bent and the fake pearls were glinting in her dark hair. He guessed he could start getting to know Leo when he returned from his desert trip, but he was reluctant to let her out of his sight. What if she disappeared while he was away, taking Leo with her? If she was determined for him not to meet his son, he wouldn’t put it past her. He wouldn’t put anything past her.
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