women do,’ she retorted. ‘And we file it under self-respect. I may have made mistakes in the past and perhaps I should have acknowledged them sooner, but I’m doing my best to make amends for that now. I’m sorry I excluded you from Leo’s life without giving you the opportunity to prove you’ve changed. That’s one of the reasons I’ve come to Russia with you, even though it’s...difficult. But there’s no way I’m going to be treated like a convenient plaything while I’m here, no matter how many of my buttons you press. So if you’d please show me my room, I’d like to go and unpack.’
His face was a picture, Erin thought. A mixture of disbelief and fury as he muttered something decidedly angry in Russian before turning away and stomping towards the grand staircase. But his discomfiture was small consolation for the aching in her body and the even greater aching in her heart.
IT WAS THE first time in a long time that Erin had been given a room she could call her own. She’d shared a cramped bedroom with Leo since the day she’d first brought him home from hospital and was used to tiptoeing around and condensing her stuff into the smallest possible space while fighting a losing battle against clutter. But Leo was now ensconced in his own cosy set of rooms just along the corridor and playing with every remaining toy from Dimitri’s childhood, which had been dragged down from the attic by Svetlana’s son.
Following her explosive row with Dimitri, he had taken himself off to his study and shut the door very firmly behind him. It had been left to Svetlana to take her and Leo on a guided tour of the house, showing them the countless rooms, the beautiful gardens and finally the indoor swimming pool, which gleamed invitingly and made Leo squeal with delight. Erin felt her heart plummet. She hated swimming at the best of times and was dreading her son’s next inevitable demand, when Dimitri walked into the pool complex.
‘Do you like swimming, Leo?’
Erin’s heart pounded as she looked up to meet the cool blue gaze, but there was no mockery or flirtation there. The briefest of smiles and a cursory nod were his only acknowledgement to her, before he crouched down to his son’s level.
‘He doesn’t swim,’ she said quickly.
‘In that case, I can teach him.’
She didn’t even get a chance to say that Leo had brought nothing suitable to wear in the water, because it seemed that swimming trunks and armbands were readily available and had already been purchased from a nearby department store. It made Erin realise that, behind the scenes, Dimitri must have been making plans for his son’s arrival before she’d even agreed to the trip and that made her feel odd. Manipulated, almost. But she didn’t have the heart to spoil Leo’s fun and her guilty secret was that she enjoyed watching Dimitri put himself out for someone else in a way she’d never seen him do before. And wasn’t the shameful truth that she also enjoyed looking at that powerful body in a pair of clinging swim-shorts, despite her intention to avert her gaze whenever he levered himself out of the water?
Water highlighted his masculinity. It gleamed and highlighted the golden skin and emphasised the honed contours of his powerful physique. It made her body sizzle with desire and she couldn’t work out a way to stop it. And the most infuriating thing was that she could have had him. She could have had him on her first night here, and yet she had turned him down.
By the third day, Leo was not only becoming confident in the water—he was behaving as if he’d spent his whole life living in a luxurious dacha. He listened to Dimitri’s firm house rules and obeyed them. He knew that the swimming pool was out of bounds unless there was an adult present and in the meantime he made friends with Svetlana’s grandson, Anatoly—who was a year older. Erin watched from the sidelines, aware that there was a lot of Dimitri in her son which she’d never seen before. Or never allowed herself to see. With the large grounds at his disposal, a playmate and a football, he was able to enjoy the kind of healthy freedom which wasn’t readily available in London.
She told herself she was grateful to Dimitri for his hospitality, but his polite and non-committal behaviour towards her was starting to drive her insane. Yet this was what she had actually asked for, so she was hardly in a position to complain about it. Was it simply a case of wanting what she couldn’t have? Like when you tried to cut down on sugar and it left you craving something sweet.
Dimitri wasn’t sweet. He was the antithesis of sweet. He was hard and strong and ruthless. But here he was showing a side of himself she’d never seen before. She’d never imagined he could be so gentle, or that his cold face could warm into such a breathtaking smile when he interacted with his little boy.
Suddenly, she felt like someone who had been left out in the cold. As if she were the outsider.
After dinner on the third night she’d gone to her room and shut the door behind her with a heavy sigh. She should have felt, if not exactly happy, then at least content. It had been another successful day. Dimitri had taken them deep into the forest in the crisp cold, and they’d all been worn out with fresh air and exercise. Leo was fast asleep next door and, although supper had been civilised and delicious, Dimitri had been called to the telephone soon afterwards and had excused himself. He had shut himself in his study and showed no sign of coming out and so Erin had come upstairs to bed.
She began to unbutton her cardigan, wondering how he would react if she went and found him and told him she’d changed her mind. That she no longer cared about being treated like a plaything if only he would kiss her again. She hung the cardigan over the back of the chair and pulled a face at her washed-out reflection in the mirror. But that would be the action of an idiot, wouldn’t it? Long-term pain for short-term gain.
She’d just put on her nightdress when there was a knock at the door and, thinking it might be Leo, she sped over to answer it, her bare feet making no sound on the silky antique rug. But it wasn’t Leo; it was Dimitri who stood there and she despaired at the predictability of her reaction as the breath dried hotly in her throat.
‘Is it Leo?’ she questioned.
‘No, Erin—it isn’t Leo.’ He glanced over her shoulder. ‘You weren’t in bed?’
‘Not yet.’ She was grateful for the darkness, which hid her sudden blush. And for the nightdress, which concealed her rapidly hardening nipples. ‘I was just about to turn in.’
‘May I come in?’
She didn’t ask him why and that was her first mistake. Her second was not to move away when he shut the door behind him. To get as far away from the intoxicating closeness of his body as the dimensions of the room would allow.
She tried to match the studied politeness he’d been showing her all day, but suddenly she noticed a new restlessness in his eyes. A certain tension in his powerful body. ‘What is it that you want, Dimitri?’
She was trying to sound matter-of-fact but she failed miserably and something about the thready quality of her voice made his eyes narrow.
‘I’ve come to say some things which I should have said a long time ago.’
She looked at him. ‘What kind of things?’
Dimitri met the question in her green eyes and hesitated, because what he was about to do did not come easily to him. He had grown up in a world where explanations were never given, where feelings were buried so deeply that you could almost fool yourself into thinking they didn’t exist. And he had carried on that same sterile tradition into his
