in a soft voice, ‘Miss Edmonds—’
‘I know.’ Maisy gave him a resigned smile, then yawned, ruining it. She stretched and gathered up her angora travelling blanket, and climbed out of the luxurious seat. She looked pointedly at Alexei, who had removed his jacket and was propped with his feet up, scrolling through the information on the state-of-the-art laptop positioned in front of him. He didn’t even acknowledge her, his amazing bone structure taut under this artificial light. He looked more tired than she felt, which was saying something.
‘Put Miss Edmonds in a bed,’ he said as she passed by him.
Alexei heard a faint, ‘Thank you,’ in that sweet, tangy voice of hers, and felt his whole body shift instinctively in her direction.
Down boy. He growled. This wasn’t the time or the place to indulge his sudden craving for soft-eyed redheads. He’d had six long months of not particularly satisfying sex with Tara. Five months and twenty-nine days too long, in his opinion. Although not in Tara’s. She was telling the press they were still ‘good friends’ two days after he broke up with her. Ironic, as he’d never had a female friend—and if he did he wouldn’t choose Tara.
It was complicated. Maisy Edmonds was in his household, for now. Although she was no nanny. She’d lied to him straight up—another element to keep in mind. He had a fair idea who she was: one of Anais’s crew of hangers-on. Somehow she’d inveigled her way into the house and into Kostya’s life. If Leo was alive he might have vouched for her—a single word would have sufficed. But if Leo had been alive Alexei would never have met her in such fraught circumstances, leading to such a stupid indiscretion.
Which was bound to happen again.
The fierceness of her sexual response had taken even him off guard. It had turned blind need into something more exciting, edgier. It had been he who was out of control, he recognised. Whilst she had met him every inch of the way, she had also backed down fast. Meeting that resistance had saved him from a very big mistake, and possibly a costly one. Because there were always consequences.
He didn’t do casual sex. And he didn’t do sex full stop without a condom—which he wasn’t carrying. He could only have her word on where she’d been. He wondered if Leo … Then he closed down that thought, because it suddenly made him very angry. An image of Maisy Edmonds in a towel, rubbing herself against a series of men, flashed through his tired brain, firing his temper, and he swore.
It wasn’t going to happen—not in the coming days and weeks anyway. The dust still had to settle on Leo’s portfolio, and more importantly there was his child.
Kostya had been unexpectedly lively earlier on the trip, but now was sleeping as if the world had ended. Alexei envied him that ability to completely shut down. He imagined he had possessed it once, many aeons ago, when he was an infant. A childhood rubbed raw by neglect and strife had worn it off. He rarely slept a regular eight hours. The past few days had robbed him even of that.
With the kitten safely put to bed, he could focus on what the screen was telling him. None of it was good news. His shares in Kulcor were merely window dressing. If the company foundered it wouldn’t show up as a blip on his financial radar, but it was Kostya’s inheritance—he had to hold it. It was the least Leo would have expected of him. Family came first. However, growing up with nothing but the clothes on his back had taught Alexei to value material security. When people let you down, abandoned you, and all you had was yourself, several billion in the bank was a nice bulwark against destitution.
Leo’s son would never want for anything. He would make sure of it.
A bed. Not the bed—not the one and only bedroom on a private jet—but a bed. One of three. What kind of a man had three bedrooms on a plane? Maisy smiled helplessly at her thoughts. He had a private plane. The number of bedrooms was probably beside the point.
She sat down on the sumptuous bed, looking around at the luxurious fabrics on the walls and furniture. She ran her hand over the silky bed coverings in deep purple and black. A man had definitely chosen the colour scheme, although she couldn’t quite picture Alexei Ranaevsky spending much time with fabric swatches.
She could, however, imagine him on this bed, and her mind began to drift as she settled down under the luxurious covers, entertaining imagery mainly to do with him diving into bed with her. In the fantasy she didn’t stop him; she was confident and even sexually aggressive. Part of her wanted to call a halt to the daydreaming—it wasn’t healthy; she could never act on it. He probably wouldn’t fancy her in the cold light of day … But another, darker part seized on his mouth hot on hers and his hand like a brand on her inner thigh. She shifted in the bed, irritatedly aware she was arousing herself, which only made it all worse.
She was never like this. She didn’t fantasise about men to the point where she got hot and bothered. Her mind just didn’t go there. Mind you, she hadn’t had time to have a rich fantasy life, let alone an active sex life. Not with a baby. She wasn’t even accustomed to air travel. She was the original stay-at-home girl. With the Kulikovs there had been several shuttles to the Paris house, but life with a new baby had pretty much shut down her opportunities to explore further afield than the Île de la Cité.
Her thoughts drifted from blue-eyed, hard-bodied Russian oligarchs to the more prosaic realities of her life. It had been impossible to leave Kostya for more than a few hours, and Anais had insisted no one had Maisy’s ‘way’ with him. The deal had been she would have two days a week to herself, but the reality of a demanding infant had virtually turned Maisy into the mother of a newborn, with all the rigours that involved. The only normal life she had ever had was in those few months before Anais gave birth. Then they’d been girlfriends together, enjoying each other’s company and all the fun opportunities London had to offer.
Leo had been home a lot then too, as Anais grew huge, and settled, hovering over her protectively, acting on her merest whim. Maisy had envied her friend that security, that devotion. Anais in turn had encouraged her to date, pushed her out through the door with a gaggle of Anais’s other girlfriends into nightclubs.
For a few months she had lived like any other twenty-one-year-old girl in London. Those were the days when she’d had time to spend hours trawling clothes shops and dancing until dawn. She had met a couple of boys around her age and been in the awkward position of having to choose. Dan had worked at something in the music industry that apparently involved twiddling knobs, but he had been gentle and self-effacing and would sit up talking to her in little cafes until dawn drew her back to Lantern Square and Anais’s barrage of delighted interrogation.
She had finally gone back to his flat near Earls Court and slept with him. It had seemed the right thing to do, moving the relationship along, except it hadn’t quite turned out that way. She remembered lying there on his hard bed, staring at the pattern of cracks in the ceiling as Dan pushed into her virgin body, feeling self-conscious about their nakedness and wondering if she was doing something wrong. It had been quick and painful and messy, and not something she particularly wanted to repeat with him, and with that thought had came the utter certainty she had made a mistake.
She hadn’t shared this with Anais—she hadn’t told anybody. And a few days later, after an awkward coffee with Dan and an invitation to spend the weekend with him on a working trip, she’d ended it. The fact that he hadn’t seemed too bothered had made her wonder if she was the only girl in his life.
Within weeks Anais had gone into labour, and Maisy’s life as she’d begun to live it had been over. From then on, for two years, she had been the mother of a demanding baby boy.
It would have been impossible to make Alexei Ranaevsky understand the
