“Don’t be so sure, Leonid. My private security isn’t the police and won’t care if you broke any laws. The one thing that will matter to them is that I don’t want you here.”
“How do you know you don’t want me here before you hear what I have to say?”
“I already heard it, and I not only would rather you spare me an encore, but I also wish there was some cosmic erase button to have it unsaid. If that’s all you’re here to say, I will cut everything short and have you removed.”
“You don’t need to bother. I will remove myself once I’ve done what I’ve come to do. And it’s not to reiterate what I said last night. I’m here to state my terms.”
“This time I will spare myself the aggravation of reacting to your terminal audacity. The answer to anything you have to say is no anyway.”
“If you remember anything about me, you should know I do not take no for an answer. Now, more than ever, I won’t.”
Every nerve jangled as he approached, as if to emphasize that there was no stopping his invasion of her life. With every step, she felt as if he was planting a foothold that she wouldn’t be able to uproot.
“My terms are the following—I want to become Eva and Zoya’s father, in name and in reality. You will give me full access to them, effective immediately. You won’t try to do anything to put them off me, or to put off the procedure of declaring me as their father. I will have them bear my name before the coronation. It is in just over a month’s time.”
Feeling she’d taken a deep breath underwater, her protest came out a gurgle. “Now, look here...”
He continued as if she hadn’t interrupted. “As their mother, you can and will of course dictate your own terms and I will meet every one.”
She shook her head, as if to shake off a punch to the face. “My only term is that you get the hell out of my life. You stayed out of it for two years. And that is where I demand you stay.”
His face remained as hard as stone. “That is not an option. Anything else is negotiable.”
“Nothing else is worth negotiating. I won’t let you walk into my life, making those insane demands and expecting me to fall in with your timetable.”
“I’m not walking into your life, but my daughters’.”
Knowing he was powerful enough to do whatever he wished, her mind burned rubber trying to latch on to an alternative to anger or defiance to hold him at bay. Those had gotten her nowhere. Continuing to challenge him head-on would only make him more intractable. If that was even possible.
Her only way out could be to negotiate a less-damaging deal. Something other than the takeover he was bent on.
“Listen, Leonid, let’s take a time-out and rewind to the beginning. Let’s say, for whatever reasons, you wish to acknowledge the girls as your daughters. I can, if necessary, live with that. We can come to an agreement where you can be...included. That doesn’t mean you have to be in their lives. You haven’t been since before they were born and they are totally fine without a father. I’m not saying this to be vindictive, or because of our personal history. It’s just a fact. Also consider the effort and time commitment that goes into being a parent. You can’t possibly want to be a father, especially now that you’re on the verge of becoming a king. You literally have far better and more important things to do.”
He waited until she finished her speech, then demolished it with that vacant look. “There’s nothing better or more important than becoming the father my daughters deserve. And need. No matter how adequate you are as a single parent.”
Her rage seethed again. “You know nothing of how adequate I am as a single parent, or what my daughters need.”
“Like you take exception to my opinion of your life, I would appreciate you not passing judgment on mine. Being a father is exactly what I now want to be. Becoming a king only makes it more imperative I claim all my responsibilities with the utmost commitment.”
“Fine, I won’t presume to know what you want. I’ll keep to my side of things. I need no commitment from you.”
“Then, I will change your mind about what you need.”
The way he’d said that... The way his gaze dropped to envelop her body before returning stonily to hers...
Did...did he mean something personal? Intimate...?
Before her thoughts caught fire, he disabused her of any ridiculous notion this was in any way about her. “No matter how strong, resourceful and successful you are, and though you’ve been coping exceptionally well being both a mother and a businesswoman, you will experience a huge improvement in the quality of your and the twins’ lives when you have me as a fully committed partner in raising them.”
She shook her head, feeling punch-drunk. “You come here...and just dictate to me...about the quality of my—”
“I came here, your territory still, but a less personal one, after your reaction to my showing up on your doorstep last night, because I thought you might feel less cornered here. It’s also why I didn’t have you brought to me.”
That made her locate her faltering verbal skills with a vengeance. “Oh, how considerate of you. I should be grateful you didn’t have me dragged to your territory, and instead chose to invade my professional space, getting my whole company abuzz with speculation, launching a hundred rumors, undermining me and generally disrupting my life?”
“I figured whatever I did, it wouldn’t meet with your approval, so I did what I thought least threatening to you.”
“Great rationalization, but...”
He continued speaking as if he was playing back a recording. “Starting tomorrow, I expect to be allowed in to see my daughters without resistance or ill will. I would very much prefer, for their sake and yours, if we do this on the most amicable terms possible. I hope you won’t force me to resort to more drastic measures.”
Having finished the speech he’d come to deliver, he turned and walked away. She could only stare after him, feeling as if she were sinking in quicksand.
Before he stepped out the door, he paused, turned. “I’ll come by your house a couple of hours before the twins’ bedtime.”
Kassandra waited until he closed the door after him, then collapsed on her chair like a demolished building.
As everything seeped into her mind and its full impact registered, she reeled harder. Not only with the disaster in progress she could see spiraling out of control, but with how much of a stranger he’d become.
Those first hellish months after he’d kicked her out of his life, she’d been anguished by how his feelings for her had withered, then reversed. But with him so distant and clinical now, she finally believed he’d never felt anything in the first place. She didn’t count at all to him, neither in the past nor in the future he had so carefully planned for them all.
The future she couldn’t let come to pass.
She couldn’t let this automaton near her daughters. His new programming might dictate it, but if there was anyone Eva and Zoya were better off without it was him.
But she couldn’t stop him. He had the legal and personal clout to do what he wanted. She didn’t have a leg to stand on, let alone a weapon to fight him off with.
But...that wasn’t true. She did have weapons.
At least her best friends did. Selene, Caliope and Naomi had access to three of the most lethal weapons in the world. Their husbands. Each man was at least as powerful as Leonid was, if not more. He’d have no chance against their combined might.
Fumbling for her cell phone, she called Selene. As soon as she answered, she told her she was adding another call to Caliope, then repeated the process with her, adding another to Naomi, too, merging the calls.
The three women, once they were part of a four-way conference call with her, chorused anxiously, “What’s wrong?”
“Everything,” she choked. “I need Aristedes. And Maksim. And Andreas.”
Six hours later, Kassandra looked around her office, her cheeks burning.
Her friends hadn’t even asked her why she’d needed their husbands. After making sure she wasn’t in any immediate danger, they’d all hung up. She’d expected them to get their husbands to call. They’d actually sent them over in person.
And here they all were. Aside from Leonid, the three most imposing and hard-hitting men she’d ever seen.
According to Aristedes’s concise explanation, as soon as their wives had told them to drop everything and fly to her side, they’d each jumped on their jets and crossed the continent from New York to her. And they didn’t seem bothered in the least by being ordered around like that to do her bidding...or rather their wives’. If she didn’t love her friends so completely, she would have envied them having such unique men wrapping themselves so lovingly around their every inch. Their fairy-tale relationships had always emphasized how abysmal her situation with Leonid was.
Loath to impose on them more than absolutely necessary, she rushed to recount her dilemma.
But as she talked, the men looked much like three souls who’d walked into the middle of a foreign movie, clearly lost.
“Hold on a minute.” That was Aristedes, shipping magnate and Selene’s, her oldest friend’s, husband. It had been through Selene’s marriage to him that all of them had become best friends. Caliope being Aristedes’s sister and Maksim’s wife, and Naomi, Selene’s sister-in-law and Andreas’s wife. He sat forward with a spectacular frown marring his impossibly handsome face. “You’re talking about Leonid Voronov?”