His Last Chance at Redemption

by Michelle Conder

  Bracing himself, Leo looked at his son. A boy he didn’t want and a boy who hadn’t asked to be born. Some might call it fate that Amanda had conceived on that one time they had had sex. He knew Lexi Somers thought Ty was suffering from his absence but Leo didn’t want to believe that. He had always believed he was doing the right thing, the honourable thing, in staying out of Ty’s life. In leaving him with his mother. But it seemed he might have been wrong and he couldn’t stomach that. Couldn’t stomach the thought of making a mistake again, of being responsible for another person’s future happiness.

  But still Lexi’s words nagged at him. Was she right in suggesting that Ty’s emotional needs were suffering? She was the expert who had cared for him for two years. Why would she say it if it wasn’t true? And why had Amanda’s mother been looking after Ty? He needed to find out more information, that was clear.

  ‘Do you want to come join us?’ The soft query from the angel—on the floor—brought his attention back to the present. His eyes met hers and he saw a wealth of questions in her guarded expression. She was trying to figure him out and that wasn’t going to happen.

  He stood up and pierced her with a warning look that had been known to make grown men quake.

  The plane dipped slightly and one of the small cars Ty was playing with rolled towards him. Leo automatically bent to pick it up and then his eyes met his son’s. They were blue, like his. And he could see now how Lexi had made the connection between them so quickly. On top of the eye colour, his son had the slashing eyebrows and strong bone structure that indicated his Cossack ancestry. Leo held his breath as dark images of Sasha at that age rolled into his brain like thunderclouds.

  Ty moved towards him, intent on getting his car, and Leo felt the urge to get as far away from him as possible. Then he felt the unmistakable shift of the aircraft as it hit an air pocket, the bottom seeming to fall out of the plane. As if in slow motion, Ty stumbled, his little arms instinctively thrown forward to break his fall, and Leo reacted purely on instinct—reaching down and lifting his son into his arms before bracing himself against the side of the plane. They staggered together and Ty flung his arms around Leo’s neck and for the first time ever Leo breathed in his clean, little boy scent. His eyes closed, his body tensed. Within seconds the turbulence had passed, the plane once again steady.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Lexi’s worried voice broke his paralysis and he opened his eyes to find her standing in front of him. He released a breath and clenched his jaw. No, he was not okay.

  ‘Here.’ He thrust Ty at her. ‘Make sure he’s strapped in at all times while the plane is in the air,’ he grated coldly.

  ‘Mr Aleksandrov …’ He didn’t know what she had been about to say and he didn’t wait around to hear, making his way to his private bedroom for the rest of the journey. He slumped down on the edge of the bed and held his unsteady hands in front of him. Ty had felt so small and fragile. He spread his fingers and turned them back and forth, no longer seeing his own hands but those of his father’s. How had he hit them at such a young age?

  Athens was a revelation to Lexi. Hot, dry, crumbly … ancient! She loved it. Loved the busyness of the streets and the organised chaos of locals, tourists and Vespas winging in and out of the traffic.

  She pointed things out to Ty as their taxi fought its way through the gridlock to God only knew where. She hadn’t seen Leo after the incident on the plane and again found herself wondering at the type of man he was. She hadn’t missed the pain behind his eyes as he had looked at Ty on the plane. Almost as if he was looking at someone else. A ghost. And did that have anything to do with his nightmare last night?

  She knew from reading his biography online that he was an only child to ‘warm and loving parents’ who had died in a tragic accident when he was twenty. From there he had bought a scaffolding company and turned it into a global entity before expanding into hotels and construction. According to Wikipedia he had become the richest man in Russia by his thirtieth birthday, a position he still held five years on.

  But if he came from such a loving family, why had he never accepted Ty as his son? What had gone wrong between him and Amanda? She hadn’t been able to find any information about his connection to either one of them online, which was strange for such a high-profile person—which she now realised he was.

  Not to mention the most exciting male she had ever set eyes on. Not that she planned to do anything about that. She only wished she wasn’t so physically aware of him.

  Like now, with her thigh touching the length of his in the taxi they had been forced to take from the airport. They were supposed to have ridden in Leo’s helicopter, but as soon as Ty had heard the whine of the rotors he’d started to cry and Lexi had been pleasantly surprised when Leo had ordered a taxi instead. Now she was unpleasantly hot pressed against him in the confines of the small car and, from what she could tell by the amount of tapping Leo was doing on his phone, he hadn’t noticed at all.

  Finally, they alighted from the taxi and Lexi stretched and looked around. The port of Piraeus was teeming with activity and various large ferries and boats were docked at the tiny, industrious harbour, Athens rising behind her in a tier of mostly grubby, worn, age-old buildings.

  ‘Look, Ty—’ she pointed up the hill, where a cluster of deep green trees circled below the rocky ledge that housed the Parthenon and other ancient ruins ‘—the Acropolis.’

  The little boy looked, but of course showed none of the excitement that she felt.

  ‘Hurry up, it’s hot,’ Leo demanded grumpily behind her.

  She turned and spotted the four casually dressed bodyguards she was still not used to flanking them.

  ‘Of course it’s hot.’ She smiled, determined not to let his dark mood, or her own awareness of him as a man, colour her enjoyment of her surroundings. He had forced her to come, but it was her natural inclination to try and find the best in every situation. ‘It’s summer in Greece. Have you been to the Acropolis before?’

  Leo scowled down at her. ‘No.’

  ‘Is this your first time in Athens, then?’ she asked interestedly, shading her eyes against the sun as she looked up at him.

  ‘I come here to work, not play.’ He glanced at Ty and then back. ‘Is he heavy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. Danny will give you a tour of Proteus and see to anything that you need.’

  ‘Oh, what will you be doing?’

  Her question caught Leo off guard and he didn’t know if it was the heat of the sun, or her annoying serenity, or the fact he’d just spent the better part of an hour pressed up against her in a stifling taxi, but his patience was paper-thin. ‘If I wanted to answer to someone, Miss Somers, I’d have a wife.’

  Her eyebrows shot up and her exotic eyes, which had sparkled before as she’d enjoyed her surroundings, turned frigid. ‘A novel concept for you, to be sure,’ she retorted, stalking off ahead of him as if she were a queen dismissing a minion.

  No, angel, you’re the novel concept.

  Simmering with frustration, Leo found himself absently watching the provocative sway of her hips in jeans that were surely a size too small before indicating to two of his security detail to follow her.

  He boarded his yacht and his captain and two engineers were waiting to give him a personal tour. When that was done, he headed to his private office to work.

  Only his mind wouldn’t focus and by nightfall he had given up. Tomorrow he would have up to thirty guests enjoying a weekend on-board and he would need to be in top form for the meetings he had planned.

  Even though it was late, he decided to stop by the pool deck for a drink. It was empty, the bar closed and most of the sun loungers packed away for the night. He took a seat in a deckchair under the awning, out of sight of the prying lens of any roving paparazzi that had got wind he was on-board, and enjoyed the peaceful sound of the sea slapping against the sides of the nearby vessels and the distant rumble of city traffic.

  He heard a doo
r behind him slide open and presumed it was a steward come to see if he wanted something to drink. Then he heard the soft sound of flip-flops crossing the deck and knew it wasn’t a staff member. He watched Lexi Somers stroll to the railing and gaze out over the harbour and back towards Athens.

  There wasn’t anything overtly sexual about her in hot pink leggings and a jade-green oversized shirt but he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She had been getting under his skin since the moment he had met her. But he couldn’t for the life of him understand the attraction. She didn’t appear to be like any other woman he’d met before. She was beautiful but didn’t flaunt it, she seemed intelligent and switched on and yet she played children’s games with ease and enthusiasm. And she spoke her mind—a quality he had never admired in a woman before.

  In some ways she reminded him of the way his mother had been with Sasha—gentle and loving. Although Leo knew that his mother must have cared for him too, he knew that she had never approved of him. Where Sasha had been gentle, he had been rough. Where Sasha had been passive, he had been aggressive. He remembered that too often she had told him he was just like his father and she hadn’t meant it as a compliment.

  He returned his attention to Lexi Somers, who looked almost lost as she gazed out over the water, and he wondered if she was thinking about Paris. About her Parisian lover. Missing him, even.

  ‘Unless your intention is to be on the cover of the morning paper tomorrow, I suggest you stand back from the railing.’

  ‘Oh.’ She jumped at the sound of his voice and squinted to where he sat in the semi-darkness, the deck lit only by a few well-spaced down-lights.

  ‘I didn’t see you sitting back there in the dark.’

  Leo crossed one foot over his opposite knee, his hands clasped behind his head as he slouched a little further into his deckchair. ‘So it seems.’

  ‘I was trying to see if I could see the Parthenon at night. I hear it’s beautiful.’

  ‘All you’ll see is camera flashes going off if you’re not careful. Or is that what you want?’

  ‘Oh, yes, that would be great,’ she scoffed. ‘As you can see, I’ve dressed for the occasion.’

  Leo reluctantly ran his eyes over her. She looked more than fine to him. ‘They won’t know who you are anyway. And since I wasn’t standing beside you they’re unlikely to dig. Most likely they’ll assume you’re staff. Except if you wander around in that red bikini you had on today. I don’t usually let my staff dress like that when they’re working.’

  ‘Lucky I’m not staff.’

  ‘Your choice,’ he said, reminding her of her wish not to be paid for the weekend. Which still irked him. If he was paying her the lines of their relationship would be clearer and he wouldn’t always be thinking of crossing them.

  She narrowed her eyes as she walked towards him. ‘I didn’t see you by the pool earlier today.’

  ‘I was on the bridge.’

  ‘Spying?’

  ‘Going over the itinerary with my captain,’ he advised curtly.

  ‘I was teasing,’ she informed him and Leo felt his teeth gnash together at her amused expression.

  She wandered over and stood beside his table. ‘Ty loves the water. In summer we get out buckets and let the kids play with water in the sandpit and he’s first in line. He also loves to run. I don’t know if you noticed but when he gets going he’s—’

  ‘What’s that you’re holding?’

  She glanced at the white plastic object in her hand. ‘A monitor.’

  Leo frowned, immediately suspicious. ‘For what?’

  ‘Ty. It was one of the things I requested on the list I put together this morning.’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘If he wakes up and cries out I’ll hear him. It’s a bit like a walkie-talkie but it only transmits signals one way.’

  ‘You can’t be available to him day and night,’ he said somewhat churlishly.

  ‘Somebody has to be.’

  Leo ignored the shaft of guilt that speared his gut and made a mental note to ask his housekeeper to organise someone to assist her during Ty’s sleep time.

  Just then a steward came out and asked if they would like drinks and Lexi surprised him by ordering a chamomile tea.

  ‘It’s very calming. You should try some.’

  ‘Are you suggesting I’m not calm?’

  She tilted her head and her long hair spilled over one shoulder. ‘I don’t think I’ll answer that lest we start an argument.’

  ‘You’re here. That’s almost guaranteed to start one.’

  She smiled. ‘Now you’re teasing.’ Her eyes sparkled as she tried not to laugh at him again.

  He wasn’t, but he decided to let it ride. Sitting out on his deck on a moonlit night with a beautiful woman he did not want to be attracted to was not conducive to bringing out his sense of humour.

  ‘I tried to find you earlier tonight.’

  ‘Why?’

  She gripped the back of the deckchair in front of her. ‘I wanted to ask you if you would like to read Ty a bedtime story.’

  ‘I was in a meeting,’ he said, his voice sharper than he intended.

  She tilted her head as she considered his answer. ‘Would you have done it if you hadn’t been in a meeting?’

  He was shocked when she called his bluff.

  ‘No.’

  He could see that his curt reply had surprised her and he was glad. Don’t ask questions, moya milaya, that you don’t want answers to.

  ‘Why not?’ she asked softly.

  Did the woman never give up? Did she somehow expect him to open up and spill his guts all because she had asked an insightful question in a nice voice?

  Leo leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, annoyed with himself and her. ‘You really want to know?’

  She stepped forward, drawn in. ‘If you want to tell me.’

  ‘Take a seat.’ He indicated the deckchair next to his, his voice low.

  She looked from him to the chair and back, a shade warily, and Leo felt some primitive thrill of a bygone age rise up inside himself. The lure was set and she just had to take two more steps and then he’d trap her and tell her to mind her own business. That he would not discuss his relationship with his son with her or anyone else. He might even kiss her as well. Just to find out if she really did taste as good as his recall said she did.

  She hesitated beside the chair, but he could tell she hadn’t taken the bait. More was the pity. ‘There’s always tomorrow night.’

  He raised a mocking eyebrow. ‘To take a seat?’

  Her eyes flashed. ‘To read him a story.’

  ‘Alas, I’m all out of fairy tales, angel.’

  She pursed her lips at the pet name he’d given her and he cocked his head as he considered her. ‘Is that why you became a childcare worker? You like fairy tales.’

  ‘I like children. They’re honest and pure.’

  Like her? He leant back in his chair. ‘Could it be that you prefer dealing with children more than adults?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Of course yes!’ He gave an unrepentant grin at her fervent denial, enjoying himself all of a sudden.

  Something her next sharp words ground into dust.

  ‘Do you have any intention of spending time with your son this weekend?’

  ‘I didn’t think you wanted an argument,’ he sneered.

  ‘I don’t. I just think it’s important.’

  ‘You’re not here to orchestrate a family reunion, Miss Somers, so stop trying.’

  Her eyes glittered angrily in the low light. ‘You would have to be a family in the first place for me to be able to do that,’ she blazed back at him.

  Fortunately the steward arrived with their beverages and eased the tension that had hardened the air between them. He could feel Lexi watching him but he ignored her and picked up his bottle of mineral water, lamenting the fact that he had given up alcohol seventeen years ago and wishing it was a full bottle of S
tolichnaya instead.

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ she said, breaking the silence once the steward was safely out of earshot. ‘You grew up in what sounds like a wonderful family and yet you treat Ty as if he doesn’t exist.’

  Leo observed her with a level of calmness he was far from feeling. ‘I won’t discuss my relationship with my son with you, Miss Somers,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘so stop prying.’ She pulled the chair out opposite him and Leo felt as if a rock had settled in his stomach. She had an uncanny knack of making him feel guilty about Ty but she didn’t know the truth behind his decision. She didn’t know what he was capable of and for a split second he considered telling her. Which was madness! He never talked about himself. Ever.

  And he sure as hell wouldn’t be telling Lexi Somers about it either.

  He was just about to return to his suite when she bent one knee up and rested her chin on it. ‘Do you ever do anything besides work?’

  A myriad of answers formed in his head but they would be dangerous to play to. Because while intellectually he had already decided to ignore the chemistry between them, physically he had already started to respond to the hint of vanilla carried across to him on the warm evening air.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said evenly.

  ‘Like what?’

  Like sex. His nostrils flared as the thought hardened his groin. Right here and right now if she were willing. He saw her eyes widen slightly and knew she had picked up on the direction of his thoughts. Maybe the fact that he was staring at her mouth wasn’t very subtle.

  ‘Looking for a demonstration, angel?’

  The air between them became charged and he noticed her running her silver necklace between her fingers.

  Oh, boy.

  In trying to find out more about him and how best to influence him into spending time with Ty, Lexi had inadvertently jumped into a minefield with a man who knew where all the loaded mines were.