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

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.