by Dani Collins
“Go,” he urged with a nod. “Don’t lock the door. Call if you need help.”
She sent him an I’d rather die stare over her shoulder.
He wanted to say something sharp about her taking advantage of the amenities on the yacht that so offended her, but he had a brief flash of how she’d almost collapsed on the trimaran. It had scared the hell out of him. She needed to conserve her strength, not pit what she had against him.
As for the vessel, he knew it was an obscene expense. He’d been considering unloading it, but it was damned convenient. It had brought him quickly and comfortably to Malta and was allowing him to take care of her and the baby with ease.
Her drink appeared as she emerged wearing his robe, still flushed and glassy-eyed, but with a healthier glow on her skin. He gave her a T-shirt to sleep in and she looked with worry at Illi, making no move to change.
He read the conflict in her. She was sick, but she still wanted to be the one to care for Illi. It was as clear as the maternal tenderness she kept showing the baby with such natural ease. It was a regard that was so foreign to him he couldn’t help staring with fascination each time he noted it.
That’s how I knew I was her mother, he heard her say again as he took in her sharp cheekbones and the way her collarbone stuck out. That evidence of deprivation stoked the frustrated helplessness in him again, the one that wanted to be angry with her for not looking after herself, but how could he fault her?
He couldn’t. He could only order sternly, “Go to bed. I can hold her while I check emails. I’ll let Zach know you’re safe.”
“Oh. Yes, please. Thank you,” she said with subdued relief, and slipped back into the head to change.
Two hours later, Leon had watched a handful of videos on the basics of baby care. It turned out four-month-old babies didn’t know how to sit up so he didn’t need to be alarmed that Illi couldn’t. For a few seconds, he’d been convinced he had broken her.
Which was all he needed on his conscience. You’re the worst, Leon.
I know, he had wanted to shout. A weight greater than this tanker sat on him over some of his behavior in the past. Nothing criminally negligent, but not a lot that was particularly considerate of others. Then there were the things his father had done. At least he’d taken steps toward making reparation on those fronts.
Still, he’d been disturbed by Tanja’s outburst over struggling financially. He hadn’t sought a divorce because he’d been wary of what it would cost him, never dreaming she had thought he was so broke the legal fees would fall to her. Had she not seen a news report in the last few years? He’d been back on top for a while.
I traded my smart phone for baby formula.
That put a sick knot in his conscience. One that had him again thinking he should have made more of an effort to know where she was instead of trusting she’d moved on with her life and didn’t miss him at all.
He realized the baby had fallen asleep in his arm. Her round face and dark lashes looked like an ad for life insurance or some other peace-of-mind product. Even his hardened heart lost some of its resistant tension as he gazed on her.
Don’t get attached, he reminded himself, and gently set her in the cot Kyle had found, draping a light blanket over her.
He might have stood there and stared like a fool for hours, but a muted bell pinged. He picked up the phone and learned the doctor was boarding.
“Leon. It’s good to see you,” Kyrkos said a moment later as Leon stepped from the elevator into the main saloon where Kyrkos was waiting. Kyrkos never missed a chance to catch up if they happened to cross paths in their travels on the Med, so it hadn’t surprised Leon that he’d hailed the yacht when he’d seen it. “I don’t think you’ve met my wife, Cameron.”
Not this one, no. Leon had been at the wedding when Kyrkos married his first wife, and had only heard through the grapevine that this youthful socialite had elevated herself from office assistant to mistress and recently to trophy wife.
“I made Kiki bring me, even though your captain said it’s a medical call. I’m dying to see this yacht I’ve heard so much about. Do you mind?” Cameron asked with an appealing tilt of her head.
“Not at all.” Lavish crafts like this existed to be shown off. “I’ll have a steward give you a tour.” Leon signaled to the crewman behind the bar.
“I thought I’d find you bleeding out,” Kyrkos said. “Who needs attention? One of the crew?”
“No—” It hit Leon that he didn’t have an explanation for who Tanja was. She was tucked in his bed so he couldn’t dismiss her as merely a guest. If Kyrkos decided she needed urgent care, Leon would want to be identified as her closest relative to authorize medical care so he couldn’t call her anything but what she was.
“I need you to check on my wife. Tanja.”
“You’re married? Oh, my God! Is she pregnant?” Cameron asked with hand-clasping glee.
“What? No,” Leon said firmly, reconsidering honesty as the best policy. “Can you show our guest every courtesy while I take the doctor up?” he said to the hovering steward.
“Of course, sir.” The crewman drew Cameron away while Leon took Kyrkos up the elevator.
“Wife?”
“Kiki?” Leon countered.
“I know,” Kyrkos muttered. “But now you’re married, you’ll soon learn it’s better to pick your battles than lose the war. When did you marry? How was I not invited to the wedding?”
“It’s a long story,” Leon dismissed, leading him toward his stateroom. “We were headed to Greece, but if Tanja needs a hospital, we’ll go back to Malta.”
The good doctor came up short at the sight of the baby cot.
“She is not pregnant, is she? What the hell, Leon? You have a baby?” He peered at the sleeping Illi. “How am I the last to hear? Cammy follows every gossip site in existence.”
“It’s not something we’ve advertised. My main concern right now is Tanja. We’re assuming it’s a stomach bug from drinking some stale water. She’s been running a fever since this morning and she’s nauseous.”
Tanja blinked in disorientation when he gently woke her, but predictably asked, “Where’s Illi?”
“Napping.” He pointed toward the adjacent room. “This is Dr. Kyrkos.”
“Hi.” Since she’d gone to bed with her hair damp, Tanja’s red-gold hair was bent in odd directions. Her face was pale, and his T-shirt hung off her bony shoulder when she sat up.
She answered his questions about her general health and the onset of symptoms, said “ah,” and accepted a thermometer under her tongue.
Her fever had come down thanks to the pills the medic had given her.
“I agree with the medic’s assessment. This will likely work itself out within a few days. Keep your fluids up, your fever down. If things worsen, definitely visit a doctor in Athens. I can take a sample to the lab in Malta as a precaution if you like, to be sure it isn’t anything more serious. We’re headed there.”
Tanja held out her arm for a blood draw and then took a cup into the head.
“Is she a model?” Kyrkos asked while Tanja was absent. “She’s very thin. Iron supplements and a multivitamin would be a good idea.”
Leon texted that instruction to the purser.
As Tanja came out of the head, Illi began to cry in the other room. Tanja would have gone to her, but Leon stopped her.
“I’ll look after her. Go back to bed.”
“She hasn’t eaten since we’ve been aboard, has she?”
“No, but I had all her bottles sent down to the chef so everything could be sterilized and ready when she needs it. I can handle it.” He was speaking with more bravado than genuine confidence, but Tanja looked so weak and peaked.
She wore an indecisive look, but Kyrkos said, “It’s a good idea to give her formula while you’re under the weather. Keep
your strength up.”
“Oh, um—”
Leon could tell she was about to explain she hadn’t given birth to Illi and therefore wasn’t nursing. He signaled behind Kyrkos’s back to keep that detail to herself for now.
“Okay,” she murmured with a small frown of confusion. “Thanks for the checkup.” She went back to bed, and Leon waved Kyrkos to lead him from the room.
Leon gathered Illi on his way out the door. She was looking very pitiful with her crinkled chin and teardrops on her cheeks. She rubbed her face into his shoulder when he held her against his chest, digging her way further under his skin with the small gesture.
“I know you’re hungry,” he said, unconsciously echoing what he’d heard Tanja saying to her when she’d been waiting for Illi’s bottle to warm on the trimaran. “We’re going to get you something right away.” He picked up the phone by the elevator and asked the chef to prepare a bottle, requesting it be sent to the main saloon.
“I could have sworn we were kindred spirits when it came to kids, but look at you,” Kyrkos snorted as they went down the elevator. “What’s it like? Being a father?”
Leon wanted to choke out a laugh and say, Ask me when I’ve been doing it longer than five minutes. At the same time, he grew self-conscious with the knowledge he wasn’t one. Not really. Which bothered him for some reason.
He couldn’t explain that twinge any more than he could explain this well of concern for a baby he’d met barely twenty-four hours ago. He wasn’t a sentimental person and certainly hadn’t had much role modeling when it came to nurturing. Illi was very small and helpless, though. Everything Tanja had told him about her plight, losing the mother who had essentially sacrificed her own life to give her daughter hers, sat heavily on him, prompting an empathy at her loss despite the fact his own mother was alive and well.
Besides, who wouldn’t want to calm an agitated baby? Any decent person would want to feed a helpless, hungry baby whether it was a kitten or puppy or infant. As far as magnanimity went, it wasn’t a huge effort to pat her back and speak reassurances. It certainly didn’t deserve all this cogitation and remarking upon.
“You didn’t want kids?” he asked as a diversion from Kyrkos’s question.
“It’s the reason my first marriage fell apart. My time off is precious. When I get a break, I want to spend it on the water or the slopes, not... Well, I guess you’re not inconvenienced, are you? Still enjoying life, sailing with a baby.” Kyrkos flickered his gaze around the atrium as they came off the elevator. “If you call this ‘sailing.’” The curl of his lip was a silent must be nice.
Thankfully, a steward forestalled further comments as he hurried toward them with the baby bottle on a tray as if he was serving a flute of champagne.
“The chef made it himself. He said the temperature should be perfect.”
Leon shook a drop onto the inside of his wrist to be sure, then offered the bottle to Illi.
She took it greedily, smiling around it, which made his mouth twitch. Didn’t take much to be a hero in her eyes, did it? He smiled back.
Kyrkos noticed the baby’s effect on him. He snorted again, which made Leon defensive of his growing connection with Illi. Something aggressive rose in him, a protectiveness that bordered on irrational since he had a vision of throwing Kyrkos off his yacht.
Leon dragged his attention to the steward. “Where can we find the doctor’s wife?”
“The pub, sir.”
The bar in the stern was one deck down and meant for casual gatherings and cocktails before dinner. There was abundant seating and it offered potpies and burgers with its vast selection of beer. The three screens of satellite television were invariably tuned to sports.
“Oh. My. Gawd. You have a baby?” Cameron rushed toward them as they appeared. She quickly snapped a photo of Leon before he’d realized she was turning her phone on him.
“If you want to take my photo, ask,” he said, barely keeping his temper.
“Cammy, don’t post anything unless Leon says he doesn’t mind,” Kyrkos hurried to caution her.
“Oops.” She winced a sorry-not-sorry. “I already posted, like, a million of the boat.”
“The yacht is fine. Delete the one of me and Illi.” Leon managed to keep a civil tone. Barely. Tanja hadn’t approved such a thing, and he was genuinely incensed by the young woman’s utter disregard of their privacy.
“Do I have to?” Cameron batted her lashes. “It’s really cute.”
“I was planning to thank your husband for the house call by arranging for you both to spend a week aboard Poseidon’s Crown later this year.” He let the threat of that rug being pulled hang in the balance.
“That’s more than generous compensation for my time,” Dr. Kyrkos said, giving his wife’s phone a stern nod. “Delete the photo, Cammy.”
“If you insist, Kiki.” She pouted and tapped her phone. Thankfully, they departed moments later.
* * *
Tanja tried to go back to sleep, but when an hour had passed and Leon hadn’t returned with Illi, she rose grumpily and put on a robe to go looking for them.
She got lost twice, mostly because there were two dining rooms and she confused them on the map. When she bumped into a steward, he made a call, then offered to make her a fruit smoothie before giving her directions up one deck and forward.
She sipped as she walked to the music salon, contemplating suitably cutting remarks about the yacht having a live concert stage for pop stars. She walked in to find Leon with Illi on his lap, sitting on the bench before the grand piano.
“You have to push harder,” he coaxed. “Can you do it?” He stuck his finger against the key she slapped, depressing it enough to make a soft plink. “Hear that? You try.”
Both of Tanja’s ovaries burst into song, throwing sunshine and confetti into the air while her bones softened in a giant, melting, Awww.
“They said you were giving her piano lessons.” Her rueful voice wasn’t quite as nonchalant as she was striving for. “I didn’t believe it.”
Leon glanced up, looking tired, but he’d cleaned up around his beard and wore a fresh shirt. “She was losing at roulette. I had to get her out of the casino.”
“You do not have a casino.” As she said it, she silently went all in that he did.
“I’d show you, but it’s black-tie.” He gave her robe a flickering once-over, gaze lingering an extra second on her bare ankles, just long enough to make her very aware that she wore only his T-shirt beneath the warm velour.
And that he’d always been a fan of her long legs.
Illi squawked with excitement at the sight of Tanja, little arms waving, making Tanja smile.
“That’s quite a greeting.” She set aside her smoothie and came forward to take her.
Her robe loosened and gaped. She fiddled with it before she gathered her daughter and nuzzled Illi’s cheek, using the baby as a shield against whatever vibes Leon was throwing off that she was picking up so acutely.
Seriously, any virile man with a baby was going to be a straight shot of pair-bonding chemicals to a woman’s inner cave girl. She shouldn’t let this affect her so deeply.
“You’re wearing fresh clothes,” she noted of Illi’s onesie. “Who changed you?” She glanced at Leon, expecting him to mention a maid or the doctor’s wife.
“I did.”
“Really? Why?”
“Her diaper blew out.”
“You changed her diaper?”
“Why is that so astonishing?” He looked affronted.
“I didn’t think you would know how.”
“I called the chief engineer to walk me through it.”
“Oh. Does she have kids?”
“I was being sarcastic,” he said with exasperation. “He’s an unmarried man who probably hasn’t seen a kid since he was one. No, Tanja, I m
anaged it all by myself. It’s not rocket science. Take off the dirty one, swab the deck, put on a clean one. Her pajama thing was stained so I changed that, too. What did I miss?”
Diaper cream, but they’d run out ages ago. Thankfully, Illi’s rash hadn’t been too bad lately.
“I didn’t expect you to be such a natural is all,” Tanja said, mildly defensive since he was taking to caring for a baby like it was the easiest thing in the world. She and Brahim had had quite a few misadventures in the early days.
“It’s all online,” Leon muttered, then abruptly changed the subject with a nod toward her smoothie. “Were you hungry? You didn’t have to leave the room. Dial zero for anything you need.”
“When you didn’t bring her back, I wanted to know where she was.” She craned her neck to avoid Illi’s grab for her nose.
He narrowed his eyes. “What did you think? That I gave her to the doctor to leave on a church doorstep or something? Didn’t you trust me?”
She pinched her lips, wondering why that was so astonishing. “Can you blame me?”
She sank into a chair, still very weak, especially with Illi so energetic and wiggly. She was happily bouncing her legs in frog kicks while twisting and grabbing for anything she could touch.
“But I’m her father, Tanja.” Leon’s tone was so serrated, he could have sliced bread with it. “Surely you believe I could only have her best interests at heart?”
“So do I,” she said, guilty of involving him without his consent, but he would wait the rest of his life for her to apologize for that. “You saw how difficult things have become on Istuval. Do you think I should have left her behind at an orphanage? Should I have asked Kahina to raise her when she can’t work to support herself and will be living on her brother’s generosity for the foreseeable future?”
He glanced away, grimly admitting, “No.” He rose and brought her smoothie across, leaving it on a table within reach. “But you’ve put me in a difficult position.”