Leon must be persuaded to surrender Lexi.
All her instincts were urging her to hurl abuse and accusations at Leon, to repeat the terrible things she’d privately called him over the past nightmare days. After that, she thought grimly, it would be a nice twist to get him thrown in jail.
But a rare caution warned her against this. He held the welfare of her baby in his hands. Perhaps only he knew where Lexi was. If she annoyed him, she might never see her daughter again.
Her bitter scowl of disappointment would have unnerved him if he hadn’t been engrossed in talking to a warder. She glared. Surrounded by grey and depressed people, he looked indecently fit and vigorous as he finished his conversation and threaded his way carefully between the seated prisoners and their visitors.
It seemed to Emma that his whole manner suggested he was concerned that any contact with them might contaminate him irrevocably with some vile disease.
Yes, she thought, near to choking with indignation, this place is a terrible dump! The atmosphere is rank, the bare walls are grimmer than Alcatraz and the clank of keys and clang of gates are two of the most chilling sounds on earth! And she, sweet heaven, she would have to suffer it every wretched day of her life for the next five years!
The injustice made her head spin. She was innocent. Innocent!
Aching with anger she tortured herself with the milestones she could miss in five years of little Lexi’s life. Her baby’s first words, her first steps, the momentous day when she’d start school. And daily cuddles. Smiles, gurgles, small loving arms…
She gave a shuddering sob. Those joys were her right as a mother! This was her baby, her very flesh and blood, and the person she cared for above all others. How dared he play hide-and-seek with her child!
Resolutions scattered. Uncontainable fury brought her to her feet again when he had come to a mere yard or two’s distance of her trembling figure.
‘Where is my baby? What have you done with her?’ she demanded fiercely.
‘Sit down.’ Leon snapped.
His outstretched hand gave an imperious wave and, to her amazement, it halted the two frowning warders bearing down on her. Authority, she thought with glowering resentment. He has it in spades. Well, not with me!
‘Answer my question, damn you!’ she insisted grimly, remaining on her feet out of sheer cussedness.
Tense, and smouldering with a volcanic ferocity, Leon slid into the seat at her table. And yet even there he still managed to dominate the room, perhaps because when seated his height and breadth seemed more than that of the average man. Emma scowled. Nothing about the handsome Leon could ever be remotely termed average.
The blue-black of his hair was more intense, the density of his dark and expressive eyes more mesmerising than any she’d ever seen. The people who met him were always disturbed, intimidated or attracted, depending on their sex and their connection with him. But no one ever forgot the charismatic Leon Kyriakis.
And nor had she. Not one moment of their lovemaking. Despite everything, she felt his inexorable sexual pull now and wilted at the sheer strength of his strong-boned and finely chiselled face, and the curl of his electrifyingly sensual mouth that once she’d kissed and tasted so avidly, so lovingly. Until his utterly callous betrayal.
The furnace in her loins fuelled her loathing as his burning eyes captured her gaze. For a second or two a crackling hostility shot between them, heating up the atmosphere till she felt her skin too must be on fire. And then his ink-black eyes silvered with lethal contempt.
‘Sit down, Emma,’ he repeated harshly, ‘or you’ll be back in your cell with your knitting and your mug of cocoa and I’ll be halfway to the airport.’
Alarmed, she promptly obeyed, her head lowered in anger while she curbed a wealth of tart answers. She could have kicked herself. She’d known she had to handle him carefully. And yet she’d stupidly waded in with all guns blazing. Not much of a kid-gloves approach, was it?
Calm. Restraint. Operate brain before mouth. But how, when violent emotions constantly erupted within her? She missed her baby desperately and her greatest fear was that Lexi might be pining too. No one else knew her little ways. Nobody could understand her baby as she could.
Tears suddenly blurred her vision. Knuckling them away miserably, she looked up with dead, hopeless eyes, all the agony in her heart showing plainly on her ashen face.
‘I can’t bear this any longer! If you have a shred of pity, you must tell me! Where is my baby?’ she implored.
Leon immediately edged his chair back, frowning down at the table. ‘Safe.’
He cleared his throat and fiddled with his cuff, apparently annoyed that it was showing a centimetre less than its twin.
‘Thank God,’ she whispered.
She swallowed ineffectively. There was a solid lump blocking her throat and she gagged on it, desperate to clear it so she could speak. Seeing this, he pushed a glass of water towards her and she stared, oddly surprised at the contrast between their two hands.
His was tanned, broad and virtually pulsing with life. Hers looked a ghastly white, just skin and bone, as if, she thought deliriously, she was in a living death.
She clasped the glass as if grabbing a lifeline but her hand shook too much when she raised it and she abruptly put it back on the table. No histrionics. Reasoned argument. For her baby’s sake…
The hard lump eased a little and she could swallow. ‘How…how is she?’
Her voice quavered and his mouth immediately contracted into a hard line. What had she said to annoy him? Emma felt awash with terror in case he lost his not inconsiderable temper and refused to listen to her.
‘Don’t do this to me. I must know,’ she begged wretchedly.
‘Alexandra is well and happy.’
He spoke in a stiff undertone and she leaned far across the table, frantic to hear every word he uttered. Leon seemed to shrink back as if she was invading his space. He loathed her, she thought dully. How was she to win him round?
She bit her soft lower lip intently, anxious to hear about her beloved baby. ‘Is she very upset? Does she…cry much?’ she said jerkily.
‘No.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Don’t lie to me!’ She flung the words at him. ‘She must!’
‘If I say she doesn’t, then it’s true,’ he answered irritably. ‘She’ll cry for a while when she’s tired or hungry or needing comfort but she soon stops. Otherwise she’s content. I am not a liar. I come from an honest people,’ he pointed out, forcing the words fiercely through his tightly clenched teeth.
‘I’m honest too. I don’t deserve to be in prison, accused of fraud,’ she hurled.
‘Such injustice.’ He tutted, his expression cynical and disbelieving.
Emma realised that it was no use trying to persuade him that she was whiter than snow. He had her down as a criminal and that was that.
‘Lexi’s OK, then?’ she persisted in a plaintive tone. ‘She’s eating properly?’
‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ he said irritably. ‘She’s absolutely fine. Use your common sense. Why would I allow any harm to come to her?’
Emma paused to consider this. In her experience Greeks loved children and had a way with them. Lexi was probably being spoiled rotten.
A twinge, as sharp as a knife, twisted in her breast with such force that her hand lifted to ease it. For her daughter’s sake she felt relieved that all was well, but she felt more bereft than ever.
Maybe she wasn’t necessary to Lexi’s well-being at all. Her child could exist without her. But could she exist without her child? Her heart went cold and she shuddered,