His Last Chance at Redemption (12 page)

‘Then don’t.’

Lexi’s eyes swung back to his and she shook her head as she clearly read the meaning behind that simple statement. ‘You can’t just waltz out here and treat me as if … as if …’

‘As if I own you?’

His silky words stole the breath from her lungs and set her heart pumping madly behind her breastbone. ‘What do you want, Leo?’ she asked without really meaning to but now waiting with bated breath for his answer.

You.

The single word floated into the front of his brain like a neon sign and he didn’t try to push it away as usual.

Why bother? He wanted her. She wanted him and he had already decided the best thing to do now was to give in to it.

He’d tried to ignore her all night. Had even used Katya as some sort of shield, but as soon as Anton Pompidou had laid his hands on Lexi he’d known the game was up.

Warning bells might be going off inside his head louder than a New Year’s Eve countdown but he might as well have been in a kamikaze jet on autopilot for all the good they were doing him.

He looked at her now, her low-cut gown shimmering around her, and he knew that he wanted her more than he’d wanted to possess anything else in his life.

‘You,’ he said softly, the word falling between them like a sacred offering.

He heard her breath hitch and saw her body tense, her nipples tight as they pushed against the silky fabric of her dress. He knew the air was still too warm to have brought about that reaction and his groin hardened to painful proportions as it read the signals her body was sending out.

If he didn’t touch her soon, if he didn’t get her beneath him in his bed, he just might implode.

She wasn’t looking at him but awareness vibrated between them and burned up some of the few remaining brain cells that were still functioning inside his head.

Then she turned her head, an errant curl falling over her forehead, the look in her eyes utterly disparaging.

‘Why? Did your supermodel turn you down?’

He sucked in a steadying breath. ‘I didn’t offer her anything.’

‘Really?’ She arched a delicate brow and snagged the piece of hair behind her ear. ‘Could have fooled me.’

‘I think I hurt you tonight.’

‘You confuse me,’ she said with raw honesty, ‘but if you’re seriously offering me a night in your bed then I have to tell you I’m not interested in casual sex.’

Leo studied her, aware of the scent of the sea air and the loud thud of his own heart.

‘There will be nothing casual about the sex we have, angel.’

Her eyes dropped away from his and he wondered at the flash of—uncertainty? Insecurity?—that crossed her face.

‘Lexi?’

She shook her head at him. ‘I’ve known men like you and … you have too many secrets, Leo. I couldn’t be with someone I couldn’t trust.’

Leo felt the skin on his face pull tight. ‘Are you saying I’m dishonest?’

‘I’m saying I don’t know who you are. You give nothing away and …’

‘Somebody hurt you?’

Lexi huffed out a breath and shrugged her shoulders but the movement was stilted. ‘My father led a double life and when my mother found out it nearly killed her.’ She tugged at the necklace nestled between her breasts agitatedly and then dropped it when she saw him looking. ‘I don’t know why I just told you that.’

‘Because you want to sleep with me but you’re torn.’

She shook her head. Oh, to be so confident. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you but … like I said, you have secrets and they scare me.’

‘Believe me,
moya milaya
, it would scare you more to know them.’

She shivered and wrapped her arms around her waist and Leo cursed himself for saying what he had. Then he cursed her for being the person she was. She was too genuine and almost innocent in her view of the world. She made his conscience spike and he knew that pursuing her after this would
be selfish and he’d promised himself he’d never be selfish again after Sasha’s death.

He heard a discreet cough behind him. ‘Someone had better be dead, Danny,’ he growled, not looking at his EA.

‘You might wish that were the case in a minute.’

Leo turned at the serious note in Danny’s voice. ‘What is it?’

‘You said to inform you immediately if we got word from Amanda.’

Leo’s eyes narrowed. ‘You found her, then.’

‘Not exactly. I’ve been checking your emails all day and this came in.’ He handed him a piece of paper and Leo took it, a sense of dread forming a knot in his belly.

He scanned the email and started sweating like a man trapped in a steel cage with a dozen hungry lions for company. ‘Married?’ He shook his head. ‘She can’t do this.’

Danny didn’t say anything and Leo knew that his worst nightmare had come true. Amanda was demanding that he take full custody of Ty. She had remarried and Ty didn’t fit into their lifestyle.

He felt the fist in his belly rise to his heart and emotion and pain clawed at him as memories of the past hurtled into his consciousness.

Air became choked in his lungs and Leo felt the panic he had experienced at the childcare centre when he’d first seen Ty take hold.

He needed space.

Time to think. Without looking at either occupant on the deck, he crumpled the piece of paper into his fist and stalked off.

L
EXI
wandered down the long walkways and spiral staircases until she came to her and Ty’s suite of rooms. She checked on Ty and smoothed his hair off his forehead as she watched him sleeping peacefully. He looked so much like Leo and her mind automatically wondered where he had gone. What he was doing.

He had said ‘married’ in such a tortured voice Lexi could only surmise that Amanda had remarried and the news had clearly devastated him. Her heart clenched in reaction and her skin grew hot. Her earlier assumption that he still harboured strong feelings for Amanda Weston was clearly correct.

She straightened Ty’s sheets and let herself out of his room and crossed to her own. She knew Carolina was asleep in the other room with the monitor on and that she would not be needed any more tonight.

She kicked off her heels and wandered out onto her private terrace. The air held a faint chill now that a soft breeze had picked up and she rubbed her bare arms. She turned back inside and poured herself a glass of water and sat down at the small writing desk, running her fingers over the edge of her laptop before jumping up again. She was too wired to sleep and too restless to work.

Again her mind drifted to Leo and she wondered if he would want someone to be there for him when he was feeling terrible. Instinctively, she knew that he wouldn’t but sometimes
people didn’t know what they needed until they had it. She knew he wasn’t a talker but maybe he’d never had anyone offer a listening ear before. She might question his morals and his life choices, but he was a human being in pain and everyone needed someone at a time like this.

Not questioning her motives too closely, Lexi donned her heels and decided that the only way to put her mind at rest was to find him, make sure he was okay and then return to her room.

Pleased with her plan, she took the elevator up to his level and tapped lightly on his door. After a minute she knocked harder and then, still hearing nothing, turned the door knob and opened the door.

She hadn’t really expected it to be unlocked and now she was faced with the dilemma of whether to just close it and leave or … close it definitely!

‘Remind me to station security outside my door.’ Leo’s gruff words carried across the room and nearly gave her a heart attack and Lexi let the door swing further open, just in time to see Leo disappearing into the opposite doorway.

Okay, so he wasn’t dead … Lexi let her gaze drift over the room in front of her and gasped at the size and understated opulence that greeted her eyes.

It was a living room with a huge cream sofa and matching chairs that looked comfortable enough to sleep on. Large domed lamps flanked the sofa and gave the room an intimate, golden glow that set off the smooth polished cabinetry around the room to perfection. A flat-screen TV lined one entire wall and opposite that an open doorway led into what Lexi assumed was the bedroom Leo had just disappeared through.

Before she could stop herself she crossed the carpeted floor, trying not to think about the last time she had entered Leo’s bedroom in his London apartment, and peeked inside. It
was
his bedroom and it was dominated by a huge bed facing
curved floor-to-ceiling windows that looked onto a private deck. Clearly the man liked his views.

Lexi saw him sprawled on one of the sun loungers outside and wandered to the open doorway; the light of the moon casting him in shadows.

‘What do you want?’

He didn’t turn and Lexi hovered there, uncertain as to whether she should stay or go, some inner instinct telling her that he needed her right now. ‘I wanted to make sure you were okay.’

Stars twinkled overhead in the navy sky and the only sound was that of water slapping as it broke against the side of the yacht. ‘Still trying to solve the problems of the world, angel?’

Lexi returned her gaze back to him. He wasn’t looking at her, but lay with his eyes closed and his hands folded behind his head. ‘No. I thought you might like company.’

He opened his eyes, his gaze raking her from head to toe before closing them again. ‘You’re wearing too many clothes for the company I need right now.’

‘It might help if you talked about what’s wrong.’

‘Really.’ His voice was snide and Lexi questioned her decision to interrupt him. ‘Let’s give it a try, shall we. I don’t want Amanda to be married and to leave me in charge of the care of my son.’ He bared his teeth in a parody of a smile. ‘
Net
. Still married. What a surprise.’

Lexi moved out onto the balcony and shivered as she felt the chill in the air descend on her bare skin. Or was that just the frost coming off the brooding man with his eyes now fixed on some dark spot in the distance? She perched on the matching chair beside his. ‘I know you’re upset at the news.’

‘Upset? I’m not upset, angel. I’m furious.’

‘Because you love her?’ she acknowledged ruefully.

‘You think that’s what’s going on here? You think that I
love
Amanda Weston?’

‘You seemed devastated by the email she sent and—’

His sneer stopped the rest of her words. ‘And you thought it was a love gone wrong. I don’t do love, angel.’

‘If it’s not love you feel for Amanda, then … I’m confused. Why do you act as if Ty doesn’t exist?’

‘Because to me he doesn’t.’

Lexi’s breath caught in her throat. She wouldn’t believe that. She
couldn’t
. ‘I don’t believe you.’

He paused and she didn’t think he was going to answer her.

‘You want to know what happened with Amanda, I’ll tell you. She came onto me at the Brussels Airport when all flights were grounded and we had sex. It was never going to be anything more than one night but she was looking for a rich husband and we used her condom—which I later found out she had already tampered with. It was a one-night fluke but she hit the jackpot.’

‘That’s terrible.’

Leo looked at Lexi’s shocked face. Why had he told her that? He’d never told anyone before. Was it because he was sick of her thinking that he’d abandoned Ty for nothing? ‘Poor Lexi. Doesn’t that fit in with your ideal world where two parents love their children beyond measure?’ He shook his head dourly and turned back to the ocean.

‘I don’t live in a fantasy world, Leo, if that’s what you’re suggesting. I know that sometimes one loving parent is better than two who can’t get along.’

Leo glanced back at her averted face. Her chin was angled defiantly, her spine rigid. He knew instantly that whatever had gone on in her own childhood had affected her deeply and, despite his never having been interested in a woman’s past before, he couldn’t hold back his curiosity. ‘You’re talking about your father’s double life, I take it.’

She stared at her hands for a minute and then her eyes met his. ‘Yes. My father was a mildly successful golfer who travelled the world and my mother accepted that as part and
parcel of loving him. She was a very understanding person and she never pushed to travel with him—mainly, I think, because she would have found it hard with Joe and I—but nor did she push to marry him. Then one night her world fell apart when the daughter he had fathered with his long-time mistress had an accident and his mistress gave him an ultimatum. Mum or her.’

Leo looked over and saw that Lexi’s jaw was tight. ‘And he chose the other woman.’

‘He did try to visit Joe and I but … somehow he never seemed to make it.’ She gave a forced laugh. ‘For years we would dutifully dress in our best clothes once a month in the hope that today would be the day he would keep to his promise. Only it rarely was and soon Joe stopped dressing up altogether.’

‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Did you stop dressing up?’

She fingered the necklace, a move he had noticed her do countless times before when she was nervous, and wondered who had given it to her. ‘I’m a bit of an optimist.’ She laughed a little self-consciously. ‘I might have given him more of a chance than Joe.’

‘A bit of a dreamer, you mean,’ he said, but there was no harshness behind the words. Just resignation that he could never be as forgiving. ‘Who gave you that?’

His eyes dropped to the necklace she was drawing back and forth across her bottom lip and wished it was his tongue.

‘My father gave it to me on my tenth birthday.’

‘And you’ve never taken it off since,’ he guessed.

She let it drop back down between her breasts and when she spoke her voice was choked. ‘You make me sound pathetic.’

‘Not pathetic. Just someone who believes in happy ever afters.’

‘Is that such a bad thing?’

Leo wasn’t particularly comfortable with the turn of the
conversation and contemplated telling her to leave. If only he didn’t want her so damned much. ‘Only if it means you don’t see things for what they really are,’ he said, raising a mocking eyebrow, willing her to deny that she didn’t.

‘What makes you think that I don’t?’