pain in her chest intensified as a harsh protest scraped its way from her throat. He’d come to gloat! To read her the riot act, to talk about her lack of morals and his right to take Alexandra.
Right! she seethed. What about her right to justice? Her rights of motherhood? Why had she automatically lost her rights as a human being?
Battle-ready, Emma drew her weary body upright, her eyes glittering with anger. She’d have him arrested! He was a fool to have come…
The thudding of her heart seemed to trip and falter as logic poured cold water on her impetuous thoughts. Leon was no fool. If he was here, it was to say something important. What could that be?
Her fevered imagination quickly provided answers. Her baby was dead. A cot death. An accident. An unidentified sickness…
She gasped, and somehow she was on her feet, catapulted by an unknown force that had flung her chair violently to the ground. Leon’s eyes swerved to meet hers and he recoiled in shock, as if her appearance appalled him. But Emma was way beyond personal pride.
‘Is she dead?’ she yelled hysterically across the vast hall.
Aghast, he shook his head and mouthed one word. ‘No!’
She swayed, her whole body sagging in relief. A warder roughly ordered her to sit but her knees were already giving way beneath her and if a fellow prisoner hadn’t righted her chair Emma would have collapsed in a crumpled heap onto the floor.
Her baby was alive. Alive! ‘Thank you, God. Thank you,’ she whispered emotionally.
She trembled all over, her knees juddering against the low metal table. Hands as shaky as a drug addict’s covered her eyes. She knew she couldn’t take much more.
I must stay calm, she thought in panic. To be more controlled and rational. OK, maybe restraint had seldom featured in her impulsive and passionate nature and her life had been splattered with spectacular foot-in-mouth mistakes—but she had to find some semblance of control. 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,
