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,