Billionaires: The Daredevil: Claimed for Makarov's Baby / Defying the Billionaire's Command / Redeeming the Billionaire SEAL. Michelle Conder

she said slowly.

      He gave the ghost of a smile, as if another small battle had been won. ‘Why didn’t you?’

      Erin shook her head. It was difficult to think straight when he was this close. Tara had told her that she’d rung Dimitri because there was the possibility that he might have changed. But what if he hadn’t? What if his world was as dark and dangerous as before? And suddenly the truth came blurting out—the memory having the power to hurt her, even now.

      ‘But I did try to tell you. Don’t you remember?’

      His eyes narrowed and he shook his head. ‘When?’

      ‘I came round to your home one Saturday morning, because I felt it best to tell you away from the office. It was just over two months since we’d slept together.’ She paused to let her words sink in. ‘I suppose it was my own fault. If I’d waited until midday, you might have been alone.’

      She had been scared, naïve, foolish, hopeful. It had been ten weeks since she’d spent the night with him. Ten weeks since he’d taken her virginity without realising and then acted as if nothing had happened. He had gone away to Russia on business and then on to the United States. She had suspected that he was deliberately putting distance between them. The weeks had drifted by and her contact with him had been limited to the strictly impersonal. To telephone calls and emails. Clearly he regretted that momentary lapse, which had started with an unexpected kiss and had ended with him thrusting into her over his dining-room table.

      She thought at first that her period was late because of the stress and the emotion of having broken the professional boundaries by sleeping with her boss. But her aching breasts were not so easy to ignore. And then she’d missed a second period and had done the test—sitting on the floor of her bathroom and staring at it in disbelief. She knew straight away that she had to tell Dimitri, but she had been so confused. And frightened. She’d blocked out thoughts of how he might react, but one thing she had known above all else was that she wanted to keep this baby. And that her feelings for her boss were secondary to that one fundamental truth.

      But Dimitri was away travelling and she was aware she couldn’t tell him something like that over the phone, or by email. Apart from anything else, she was terrified it might be intercepted or overheard. On escalating tenterhooks, she waited until he flew in and phoned to say he would be back in the office first thing Monday. She tried to blot out the fact that a new distance seemed to have entered his voice, and that he sounded cool when he spoke to her. And that was when she’d known that she couldn’t wait a moment longer and she couldn’t tell him at work. She would go round to his apartment and tell him face-to-face, because there was never going to be anything like a ‘perfect’ time to break the news that she was carrying his baby.

      She had—foolishly, in retrospect—gone to a lot of trouble with her appearance that morning. She’d washed her hair and applied a little more make-up than usual. She’d put on a dress, because, she remembered, it had been a sunny spring day—but it hadn’t been as warm outside as it had looked from the window of her apartment, and she remembered her bare legs being covered in goosebumps. Afterwards she’d wondered whether she had stupidly been hoping for some romantic conclusion to her news. That he would sweep her into his arms and look down at her with shining eyes, and tell her that it was all going to be okay.

      Of course she had.

      But he had taken ages to answer the door and, when he had, he had been bad-tempered, sleepy and half naked, his icy eyes narrowed and bloodshot, and his hard jaw shadowed with growth.

      ‘What is it, Erin?’ he questioned impatiently, zipping up his jeans with a slight wince. ‘Can’t it wait?’

      She had walked into his apartment, noting the general scene of disarray which greeted her. There was an empty champagne bottle lying on the floor and another which was half drunk—standing on the same table where he had taken her virginity. Now was probably not the right moment to tell him that he was going to be a daddy, but what choice did she have? Tell him on Monday—trying desperately to squeeze in the unwelcome news between wall-to-wall meetings?

      It took her a moment or two to notice the various items of female underwear strewn around the room because she was too busy ogling the lurid cover of what looked like a porn film. She remembered colour flooding to her cheeks as she recalled the picture of a woman wearing very little other than a leather thong and wielding some sort of whip, with a scary look in her eyes. Erin had little experience of men and what they got up to in their leisure time, but even she could work out what had been going on.

      And it was then that a woman had appeared from the bedroom, making Erin feel like the biggest fool in the world, because the the woman was completely naked. Her long blonde hair was mussed, her eyes all smudged with mascara and her large breasts jiggled provocatively as she walked into the reception room—completely ignoring Erin—and pouted at Dimitri.

      ‘Aren’t you coming back to bed, lyubimiy?’

      The fact that she was obviously Russian had only made it worse—if it was possible for such a situation to get any more dire than it already was. Erin saw the expression on Dimitri’s face—a mixture of irritation at being interrupted and an unmistakable look of lust, which had automatically darkened his eyes.

      ‘Go back to bed and I’ll be there in a minute,’ he said, before fixing Erin with an enquiring look. ‘So what is it, Erin? What do you want?’

      ‘I...’ Erin had been at a loss; her words tailing off until the blonde had wiggled her way back towards the bedroom and she had been momentarily transfixed by the retreating sight of her pale, globe-like buttocks.

      ‘Look.’ He paused, as if searching for the right words to say, but of course there were no right words. ‘I think we both know what happened that night was a mistake and if you were hoping for some kind of repeat—’

      ‘No! No, of course I wasn’t,’ she said, forcing some stupid, meaningless smile onto her lips as she realised there was only one direction she could contemplate taking. ‘I came here to hand in my notice.’

      Was that relief she saw on his face? Was it?

      ‘You’re sure about that?’

      Erin nodded. And the fact that he didn’t try to talk her out of it spoke volumes. She had fooled herself into thinking she was his indispensable ally—the woman he couldn’t do without. And yet she was so wrong. She had become an embarrassment, she recognised. The frumpy secretary he’d stupidly bedded in a mad moment when he hadn’t been thinking straight. Had he been afraid that she was going to start mooning around after him at the office and becoming a sexual nuisance? Was that why he had uncharacteristically absented himself from England for so long?

      ‘I’d like to leave immediately, if that’s okay with you,’ she said, as briskly as possible. ‘I can easily find someone to step in for me.’

      His eyebrows had winged upwards. ‘You mean you’ve had a better offer?’

      ‘Much better,’ she lied.

      He smiled slightly, as if he understood that. But she guessed he did. Dimitri understood ambition and power and climbing the ladder towards the ever-higher pinnacle of success—it was feelings he was bad at.

      But he had made a stab at expressing regret—even if he had done it badly.

      ‘I want you to know that I’ve...’ He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. ‘Well, I’ve enjoyed working with you these past years.’

      The easiest thing to have done would have been to have withdrawn gracefully before he probed any further and worked out for himself that there was no other job. Murmured something polite before she walked away for good, so that she could leave on amicable terms. But Erin cared about Dimitri, no matter how much she told herself he didn’t deserve it. She had looked into his haunted and sleep-deprived eyes and, although she found herself wishing she could take his unknown pain away, deep down she knew she couldn’t save him. He was the only person who could do that. But didn’t she owe him