Twin Heirs To His Throne

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?”

She’d confided in her best friends about Leonid when she’d told them of her pregnancy. Since they told their husbands everything, she’d assumed they’d told them. But it was clear, if Aristedes’s reaction was any indication, that her friends considered her secrets sacrosanct.

It meant this meeting just got more agonizingly embarrassing, as she had to explain everything from the start.

After she did, Maksim, the one who used to have a personal relationship with Leonid, stood up, rage distorting his equally impressive face. “You mean you told him you were pregnant, and he didn’t only kick you out of his life, but implied he’d prefer you terminated your pregnancy?” As she nodded warily, he growled, “I’m dealing with that scum of the earth. He’s a fellow Russian and it’s on me you met him at all. I invited the louse to my wedding.”

“Settle down, Maksim.” That was Andreas, Aristedes’s younger brother and the most dangerous of the lot. “If there’s punishment to be doled out, we’re all getting a piece of him.” He swung his icy gaze to Kassandra, making her almost regret recruiting their help. Andreas had once been involved in organized crime, and remained as lethal, if not more so, now that he’d gone legit. “But this guy says he’s back to atone for his mistakes. Any reason to believe he doesn’t mean it?”

“Oh, I believe he means it,” she groaned. “As much as I believe the road to hell for me and the girls is paved with his good intentions.”

Aristedes pursed his lips, propping an elbow on a knee. “But if he’s owning up to his responsibilities, perhaps you should give him some leeway, in a limited wait-and-see fashion, without making any promises or changes in your lives?” Aristedes looked first at Maksim and then Andreas. “I think I speak for all of us when I say we were all once in more or less his same position, and we would have given anything for a second chance with the women we love and the children we fathered, or in Andreas’s case, the child he was named guardian of.”

Maksim’s dark fury ebbed as he considered his brother-in-law’s point of view. “Now that you put it that way, I can’t even think what would have become of me if Caliope hadn’t given me a second chance. One I didn’t think I deserved and she had every right not to give me at the time.”

Heart contracting at the turn in conversation, she choked out, “None of your situations was anything like mine with him.”

Maksim winced. “Now that I think of it, I almost did the same thing to Caliope. I, too, abandoned her when I knew she was pregnant.”

“It’s not the same at all,” she protested. Maksim had had the best of reasons for walking away. His father had been abusive. He’d feared he’d inherited his proclivities and had been terrified of hurting his vulnerable loved ones. “You thought you were protecting her and your baby.”

Maksim sat back down, gaze gentling. “Maybe he has a valid reason, too? At least one he believed to be valid?”

Feeling cornered, she realized she couldn’t get them on board without telling them everything. What he’d said to her in the past, and in the present, that she’d never meant a thing to him, that he was only back now for his “heirs” because he believed it was his duty and destiny, now that he was going to be king of the land of the two goddesses.

By the time she’d finished, all three men’s faces were closed with so much wrath, she felt anxious about the extreme measures they might take in dealing with Leonid. In spite of everything, she found herself worried for him.

As she tried to think of a way to mitigate their outrage and their consequent actions, Maksim heaved up to his feet again, clearly bringing this meeting to an end.

“Don’t worry about Leonid anymore, Kassandra,” Maksim said. “I’ll deal with him.”

Following him up, Andreas corrected, “We’ll deal with him.”

Troubled by the respectively murderous and predatory looks in the two men’s eyes, she turned to Aristedes, her oldest acquaintance among them, and ironically, since he was generally known as the devil, the one who scared her the least.

Sensing her anxiety, Aristedes gave her shoulder a bolstering squeeze. “I’ll keep those two in check, and resolve this situation with the least damage possible.”

As they each gave her pecks on the cheek, she was torn between being alarmed she’d let loose those hounds of hell on Leonid, and being relieved she’d soon have this nightmare over with.

By the time she leaned back on the door, panting as if she’d run a mile, she decided she should be only relieved.

Leonid had only himself to blame for whatever they did to him. If he wanted to escape those men’s punishment, he should have settled for being a king, away from her and the girls.

* * *

“Yes, I understand,” Kassandra said to Maksim.

She’d said almost the same thing to Andreas and Aristedes before him, just to end the calls with them, too.

For she certainly didn’t understand at all. How the three predators, who’d left her office out for blood yesterday, had each come back to her less than a day later, purring a totally different tune. That of urging her to give Leonid a chance.

How had he managed to get to them all? What had he said to have them so wholeheartedly on his side?

But why was she even wondering? Didn’t she already know how irresistible he could be when he put his mind to it? He’d worked the three men over but good. It was clear that their initial thoughts about having once been in Leonid’s shoes and in need of clemency were back in full force. Anything she said now would be her intolerant word against Leonid’s penitent one.

Putting down her cell phone, she pressed her fingers against burning eyelids.

So. She was out of options. There was no way she could stop Leonid herself. All she could do now was make sure he didn’t turn their lives upside down.

Suddenly, another bolt of agitation zapped her.

The bell. Leonid. He was here. Exactly two hours before Eva and Zoya’s bedtime, as promised.

She wouldn’t even wonder how he knew at what time she put them to bed. She had a sick feeling he knew everything about her life with the girls over the past two years. And that there was far more to this whole thing than he was letting on.

Yet she could do nothing but play along, and see what exactly he wanted, and where this would lead.

Crossing from her home office past the living room, she signaled to Kyria Despina that she’d get the door.

She took her time, but Leonid didn’t ring again. Stopping at the door, she could almost feel him on the other side, silently telling her he’d wait out her reluctance and wear down her resistance.

She pressed her forehead against the cool mahogany, gathering her wits and stamina. Then she straightened, filled her lungs with much-needed air and opened the door.

As always, nothing prepared her for laying eyes on him. Every time she ever had, an invisible hand wrapped around her heart and squeezed. Her senses ignited at his nearness, each time more than the time before.

Standing like a monolith on her doorstep, he was swathed in a slate-gray coat, a suit of the same color and a shirt as vivid as his eyes, radiating that inescapable magnetism that had snared her even before she’d laid eyes on him. Blood rushed to her head before flooding her body in scalding torrents.

And she cursed him, and herself, all over again. For him to still have this choke hold over her senses, when he didn’t even try, didn’t even want to, was the epitome of unfairness. But life was exactly that. As was he. Both did what they wanted to her, her approval irrelevant, her will overruled.

So she’d let him take his invasion to the next level. She only hoped after getting a dose of domesticity, he’d retreat to a nominal position in the girls’ lives, which she could deal with without too much damage to herself.

Certain she was opening the door to a new dimension of heartache, she said, “Come in, Leonid.”

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