Innocent in the Ivory Tower

‘Did you think, Maisy, we were going to talk about your employment contract? With you in your strapless frock and me pouring you champagne?’

Don’t say it, she willed him. Please don’t say it.

‘Or did you think I was going to take you to bed and keep you in the style to which you’ve become accustomed?’

His words stripped her of cover. She had nowhere to hide from them because it was true. She had wanted to go to bed with him. She had worn her best dress and her laciest knickers. She had drunk some of the champagne for Dutch courage.

Kostya’s future had come second to her desire to draw Alexei to her.

For the first time she had put the little boy second and herself first, and now she was going to pay for it. He’d set her up. She wasn’t fit to look after the needs of a young child. She was a sex-crazed bimbo.

Swallowing hard, she lifted guilty eyes to meet his icy scorn. Her dignity lay in shreds around her. She felt the same way she had when huddled behind the bathroom door at Lantern Square. He did this to her.

‘Are you going to send me away?’ she asked hollowly.

Their eyes locked.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

There was a fraught silence.

Alexei suddenly wanted to smash the last five minutes and go back to where they’d been before. She was looking at him like a deer caught in the headlights—that same lost look he remembered from London. It made him want to gather her up and shelter her from the harsher realities of life, including his own. But she’d pushed all his buttons with that crack about Leo. It was absurd and it was wrong, he told himself.

‘Kostya needs you.’

Maisy frowned. He said it as if the idea was distasteful to him. As if she was everything he said she was. It gave her the nerve to push out her chair and get up.

‘If your stupid investigator had done a better job he would know I never worked for the Kulikovs. I went to school with Anais. We were best friends. I would have done anything for her. And I won’t let you wreck her little boy’s life. I’m one hundred per cent sure if Anais had known the future she would have named me Kostya’s guardian. You’re Leo’s work. Leo made the mistake. Kostya shouldn’t have to pay for it.’

She took a deep sustaining breath, taking some satisfaction that he looked pale and tense, but also horribly aware she had said some cruel things. But he had too. He had said she wanted to go to bed with him for money. He had hurt her.

‘You lucked out, Alexei. I don’t want anything from you. I thought I wanted to make love with you, but now I’ve never wanted anything less.’

Swaying a bit on her heels, she didn’t look at him. She just walked away. He didn’t try to stop her. Lust didn’t override loyalty. Family came first. And Maisy, however inviting, was just a woman. Women were everywhere, he thought cynically.

‘That dress,’ he said coolly after her. ‘Nice for a nanny. Leo must have paid you well. I expect you’re very expensive to keep, Maisy.’

‘No one has ever kept me,’ she defended herself over her bare shoulder.

‘I bet.’ It was a crass thing to say, and Alexei instantly regretted it.

His throwaway line hit Maisy square in the solar plexus. He made her feel like a whore in her pretty dress and her make-up. All the effort she’d gone to … She spun around, determined not to let him have the last word, only to find he was already on his feet and coming towards her, his expression contrite, as if he’d realised he’d gone too far. But she’d moved too quickly, and her spindly heels wouldn’t support the shift in her weight, and she went sprawling, jarring her shoulder as she tried to break her fall with one arm. Pain speared up her arm, making her cry out, and then she was lying on the ground, holding her arm and sucking back tears.

Alexei was on his knees beside her instantly, his arms coming around her. But as he touched her shoulder she cried out again.

‘Let me help you,’ he said gently, his anger no longer evident.

Maisy was too shaken up to protest, but as he lifted her she was thrown into immediate physical intimacy with him and it robbed her of breath. She could feel his biceps hard beneath her back, his big hand fastened around her thigh. He had to do these things to carry her, she reasoned wildly, but after the terrible things he had said to her the shivery reaction running through her body felt shameful. She averted her face from him, determined to block him out. If he saw how much he disturbed her it would just be more fuel for his accusations.

He carried her across the roof to the access door and down the stairs, as if she weighed nothing. Pain was pulsing through her shoulder, but the sheer awfulness of how cruelly his taunts had gone home overwhelmed it. He thought she was a liar, a party girl who spread her legs for anybody with enough cash, and he didn’t want her looking after Kostya.