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just walked in.
     
    Alexis closed the door behind him and let his eyes rest on the woman lying in the bed.
    What the hell—?
    This wasn’t Rhianna Davies. It was nothing like her!
    Rhianna Davies had possessed a beauty so enticing that she had been able to make a fool of him as no other woman had ever done! Had made him feel—He couldn’t now admit how she’d made him feel. She had been a woman who could have lured him to his doom if he hadn’t found the strength of mind to throw her from him like a rotten fruit.
    But her rottenness had been hidden beneath a surface so exquisite that he had been putty in her hands…
    This woman looked like a death’s head. Gaunt, her eyes sunken into their sockets, cheeks hollow, the bones sharp like a knife, and lines etched around her mouth. Her hair was lank, much shorter than it had been, straggling limply around her haggard face.
    Involuntarily the image of the way he remembered her pushed into his mind—her body pulsing beneath him, her soft, lush curves, naked, wanton, sated.
    And before that, in that silver evening dress, her hair like a silken fall, her eyes like smoke—promising everything, everything he wanted from her…
    Something had punched through him the moment he set eyes on her at that dinner, five long years ago. Something he had never felt about a woman before. Never thought existed. He had wanted her instantly. Totally. More than any other woman he had ever wanted.
    And for the chance to slake that overpowering, insistent wanting he had broken every rule in his book—just to possess her that very night as she’d offered herself to him on a plate.
    And in the morning he’d discovered why she’d done so.
    It had been another punch to his guts.
    But quite, quite different.
    He stared down at her now, hatred in his eyes.
    This woman couldn’t be the same one.
    Thee mou , he’d known that she’d been taken into hospital after having been knocked down by a car, but that alone couldn’t account for the hideous transformation of so exquisite a beauty into this…this… hag. .
    His mouth tightened. He remembered what the social worker had told him.
    Drugs. Was that what had turned Rhianna Davies from a sexual temptress into this wasted, bone-thin hag?
    The cruel word stabbed at him. The woman looked so terrible it would be inhuman not to feel pity for her. Yet pity was the last thing she deserved. The very last thing…
    He felt the rage well up in his throat again, as it had ever since he’d looked down into the stricken face of his son.
    Any child, any, deserved a mother better than this! On top of everything that he already knew her to be—the kind of slut who traded her body for financial gain—yet she was worse still. Irresponsible, feckless, leaving a four-year-old on his own while she slept off her despicable addiction—an addiction that made her violent, brandishing a knife at the very woman appointed to protect her child…
    And that such a female was mother to his son! A son she had deliberately, calculatingly hidden from him, kept him ignorant of! Thee mou , no torment was good enough for such a woman!
    And yet rigid self-control sliced down over his seething emotions. He was going to have to treat her with kid gloves. His lawyers had been blunt, even though he had wanted to hurl them from his office. The fathers of illegitimate children in the United Kingdom had no automatic right of custody. To gain custody of his son would be a complicated, controversial business. And while it was conducted his son would remain in care, certainly until his mother was physically fit enough to look after him, and possibly—if the social worker’s case for wanting a Care Order were valid—indefinitely.
    His jaw tightened. No—that was one thing that would not continue! His son was coming out of that foster woman’s house—his unhappiness, his misery had been palpable.
    Whatever it took—he would get his son out of there!
    Even if it meant dealing sweetly